Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
Percy Bysshe Shelley, a revolutionary thinker, an intellectual for whom to think was normally to do. He believed in vegetarianism, pacifism, and free love- for marriage, he thought, enslaved women. After expulsion from the Oxford University for challenging the authorities to refute atheism, Shelley was soon known as a revolutionary who had absconded with two 16-year-olds in two years.
Wordsworth said that ‘Shelley was one of the best artists of us all: I mean in workmanship of style.’ He wrote in several styles- revolutionary satire, philosophical vision and urbane verse letters- but posterity preferred his lyrics to his radical , philosophical and political poems- strong stuff in ‘Men of England’ and ‘England in 1819’.
Shelley’s major achievement lies in his philosophical poems such as Mont Blanc, Prometheus Unbound and the Triumph of life, in the pastoral elegy Adonais, and in such lyrics such ‘When the lamp shattered’ and the Choruses from Hellas.
Philosophically, Shelley was a Platonist, holding the world of appearances less real than the world of underlying Forms and Ideas. An omnivorous reader, he was keenly interested in empirical science, and eventually became skeptical about earlier revolutionary fantasies, such as that Masque of Anarchy where ‘ankle-deep in blood,/ Hope, that maiden most serene,/ was walking with a quiet mien.
Critics who complain that Shelley’s world lacks solidity and oxygen should reckon with his serious Platonic belief that words are inadequate to express the ultimate, which is ineffable. Shelley deploys his music and rhetoric to enact a mind racing in pursuit of complex and evanescent truths.