19th Century British Poetry

Percy Bysshe Shelley was born near Horsham, Sussex, to a well-to-do, conservative family. In 1810 he went to University College, Oxford, but was expelled in his first year for refusing to recant an atheistic pamphlet he had published with a classmate. He married a young schoolgirl the following year. In 1813 he moved to London, where he worked for a number of social causes and came under the influence of the radical social philosopher William Godwin. Shelley fell in love with Godwin’s daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (author or the novel Frankenstein), and eloped to Europe with her. Byron joined them in Switzerland in 1816 and followed them to Italy in 1818. Shelley was drowned when his small boat was caught in a squall on the Gulf of Spezia. Lord Byron eulogized him as “without exception, the best and least selfish man I ever knew.” The superlative opinion of friends did not reflect public opinion at large, however. Due to his radical social, political, and philosophical ideas and his unorthodox lifestyle, Shelley had few admirers in his lifetime. An avid student of Hume and Plato, he was deeply influenced by skeptical empiricism and idealism; he distrusted all claims to certainty – he never confessed a religious or philosophical creed – but held fast to his faith in the redeeming powers of love and the imagination. It is the latter that especially informs his poetry. In the influential essay “A Defence of Poetry,” he asserts: “A Poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.” His formal achievement was great: he worked in elaborate, elegant stanza forms, many of his own invention, and displayed a complex tone of voice, which ranged from passionate to dignified and urbane.

From The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 4th Edition.