Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley was expelled from Oxford at eighteen for co-authoring a pamphlet titled “The Necessity of Atheism.” It was entirely consistent with everything he would do next. He was a radical in every direction available to him: religion, politics, diet, relationships, the structure of society. He came from a wealthy Sussex family, corresponded with William Godwin, eloped with Godwin’s daughter, and spent his years in England under persistent financial pressure and social condemnation before leaving for Italy in 1818. He was twenty-nine when he drowned in the Gulf of Spezia during a storm in 1822. Mary Shelley kept a page of Adonais close for the rest of her life.
- Born: August 4, 1792, Horsham, Sussex, England
- Died: July 8, 1822, Gulf of Spezia, Italy (age 29)
- Era: Romanticism
- Major works: Queen Mab (1813), Prometheus Unbound (1820), Adonais (1821); poems: “Ozymandias,” “Ode to the West Wind,” “To a Skylark,” “Mutability”
- Expelled from Oxford at eighteen for co-authoring a pamphlet titled “The Necessity of Atheism”
The poetry he wrote before turning thirty — “Ozymandias,” “Ode to the West Wind,” “To a Skylark,” “Adonais,” the lyric drama Prometheus Unbound — is a body of work that would justify a career twice as long. He published almost none of it to a wide audience during his lifetime and was largely ignored where he wasn’t actively condemned. Within a generation of his death, he was canonical. Within a century, “Ozymandias” was the poem people reached for every time power overreached itself and fell.
His central preoccupation was liberation — political, intellectual, emotional — and the question of whether it was possible to live according to one’s ideals in a world organized against them. He did not resolve this question. He lived it, at great personal cost, for all twenty-nine years he had.
These words are for the idealists who haven’t given up — and for the ones who needed to hear, from someone who didn’t survive his own convictions, that the convictions were worth holding anyway.
