Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 - 1822)
Near Sussex, England

"You were all brutally mistaken about Shelley, who was without exception the best and least selfish man I ever knew." - Byron upon Shelley's death

Percy's life is one of interest. At the age of ten, he was sent to boarding school and there he because introduced to science. Percy became infatuated with electricity, magnetism, chemistry, and telescopes. Percy attended Eton in 1804 and he was made fun of for his peculiarity. Getting picked on gave birth to a strong sense of anger inside Percy, he was the visionary and daydreamer, often forgetting to tie his shoelaces or to wear a hat. His odd behavior eventually earned him the nickname of "Mad Shelley." At a young age, Percy looked up to Thomas Paine and William Godwin and throughout his life, he emphatically expressed his political and religious views in a struggle against social injustice. Shelley detested the monarchy and aristocracy. He was a great believer in the idea of the power of the human mind to change circumstances for the better, in a non-violent way. The young Shelley was often seen indulging in his habit of sailing paper boats on the water of any nearby pond, lake or river, or reading with a book held right up to his eyes, lying very close to the fire. In 1811 Shelley wrote and distributed to various bishops and heads of colleges a short pamphlet he wrote on The Necessity of Atheism. Shelley was expelled from Oxford. This incident greatly upset Shelley's father and grandfather. His relationship with them and his closeness to the rest of his family was never completely mended. Although he intellectually disliked the institution of marriage, stating that it was not necessary if two people loved each other, he eloped to Scotland in 1811 and married sixteen year-old Harriet Westbrook, the daughter of a London merchant and a school friend of his sister. At the beginning of 1812 Shelley started to suffer from "nervous attacks" for which he took doses of laudanum. He would start to sleepwalk when life became difficult or stressful. In 1814, Shelley had fallen in love with Mary Godwin, which upset both Harriet and Mary's father, William Godwin. When the two persuaded Mary to stop seeing Shelley for a little while, he showed up distraught and hysterical at her house with laudanum and a pistol, threatening to commit suicide. In early 1816. Mary, Shelley and Claire spent the summer of 1816 at Lake Geneva near Byron. The famous "ghost story contest " which spawned Mary Shelley's Frankenstein took place during this period. Tragedy struck twice at the end of 1816 after Mary and Shelley had returned to London. The newlyweds eventually moved to Great Marlow, where Mary finished her work on Frankenstein while pregnant, and Shelley provided help to the poor--a habit which made the local aristocrats call him "mad". In a bout of hypochondria, Shelley imagined for weeks that he was developing elephantiasis after sitting next to a woman with fat legs on a coach. Shelley composed his Stanzas written in Dejection, near Naples. Percy Shelley could not swim, and even though he had recently been involved in a boating accident in a canal one night in which he was nearly drowned, he and several friends decided to spend the summer of 1822 sailing on the Bay of Lerici. A boat was ordered and built for this purpose -- named Don Juan by Byron, but renamed Ariel by Shelley. Meanwhile, the pregnant Mary, who was expecting in December, suffered another miscarriage in June. Shelley himself suffered from disturbing recurring nightmares and hallucinations during. On July 7, after a long trip of sailing out to visit several different friends, a sudden afternoon storm sunk the Ariel ten miles from any land. The bodies of Shelley, Williams and the boat's sailor washed up ten days later and were treated and cremated on the beach because of quarantine laws to protect against the plague. Shelley's ashes were buried in the Protestant Cemetery at Rome. His heart was first given to a friend, then to Mary, and eventually buried in Bournemouth.

Criticism
Although Shelley was an enigmatic, eccentric character, his poetry was incredible. His poetry exposes his personal philosophies with a fundamental theme of the power in human emotion and reason, the faith in human perfectibility and progress. His lyric poems are superb in their beauty, grandeur and mastery of language

Works
1816 Alastor
1819 The Cenci, a tragedy in verse exploring moral deformity
1820 Prometheus Unbound
1821 Epipsychidion poem adressed to Emilia Viviani, a young woman whom Shelley met in Pisa and with whom he developed a brief but close friendship
Adonais

Additional Information
Life and Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley:
http://www.wam.umd.edu/~djb/shelley/home.html

Sources:

"Shelley, Percy Bysshe." The Columbia Encyclopedia. Sixth Edition. Feb 2001. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001.< http://www.bartleby.com/65/sh/ShelleyP.html >

Shelley, Percy Bysshe," Microsoft® Encarta® Online Encyclopedia 2001 http://encarta.msn.com © 1997-2001 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.