Reading Notes W8: Shelley, Part B

Percy Bysshe Shelley (395-401) 

  • Only small portions of Shelley's work found its way to publication in his lifetime
  • He reported having escaped several attempts at assassination (395)
  • "a beautiful ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain," as the poet and critic Matthew Arnold put it in 1888 (395)
  • Shelley's work is still considered controversy
  • For some, he is looked at as the "fiery radical who bravely flouted convention and inspired generations of revolutionary thinkers" and as a "self-serving egoist who destroyed the lives of women he loved"
  • Others viewed him as a "philosophical poet-aristocrat who crafted beautiful and dreamy poetic reconciliations of humans with their world" (395)
  • Shelley came from a wealthy and aristocratic English family
  • His father was a member of the Parliament who held to a strict standard of respectability
  • In 1811 (after only 5 months at Oxford University), Shelley published a pamphlet called "The Necessity of Atheism" and sent it to his professors and Oxford expelled him 
  • He eloped with Harriet Westbrook
  • In 1812 he left to Ireland, where he spoke publicly in favor of Catholic rights and Irish nationalism (395)
  • In 1813, his first major poem, "Queen Mab," was distributed privately because it was too revolutionary to be published
  • In 1814, Shelley's marriage fell apart and fell in love with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin
  • Shelley often experiments with endings "that resist resolution and heapings of mismatched metaphors in order to keep his language surprising and unsettling" (396)
  • Shelley is famous for his resistance and rebellion but also formal control, which may sound contradictory
  • "Ode to the West Wind" was one of Shelley's best-loved works
  • "O wild West Wind" means Autumn, which scatter "the leaves dead Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing," (lines 2-3 p.399) and spreads "The winged seeds" so that the leaves may be nurtured by Spring

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