Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), also popular as P B Shelley, was an English poet, born at Field Place, near Horsham, Sussex, eldest son of Sir Timothy Shelley, a wealthy landed proprietor. He was educated at Eton, and in 1810 went to Oxford, where his impatience of control and violent heterodoxy of opinion, characteristic of him throughout, burst forth in a pamphlet "The Necessity of Atheism," which led to his expulsion in 1811, along with Jefferson Hogg, his subsequent biographer. Henceforth led a restless, wandering life.

He married at 19 Harriet Westbrook, a pretty girl of 16, a school companion of his sister, from whom he was separated within three years. Under the influence of William Godwin his revolutionary ideas of politics and society developed apace. He was engaged in quixotic political enterprises in Dublin, Lynmouth, and elsewhere, and above all put to practical test Godwin's heterodox view on marriage by eloping (1814) to the Continent with his daughter Mary, whom he married two years later after the unhappy suicide of Harriet. In 1816, embittered by lord Eldon's decision that he was unfit to be trusted with the care of Harriet's children, and with consumption threatening, he left England never to return. Shelley spent the few remaining years of his life in Italy, chiefly at Lucca, Florence, and Pisa, in friendly relations with Byron, Leigh Hunt, Trelawney, &c.

During this time were written his greatest works, "Prometheus Unbound," "The Cenci," his noble lament on Keats, "Adonais," besides other longer works, and most of his finest lyrics, "Ode to the South Wind," "The Skylark," &c. He was drowned while returning in an open sailing-boat from Leghorn to his home on Spezia Bay. "An enthusiast for humanity generally," says Professor Saintsbury, "and towards individuals a man of infinite generosity and kindliness, he yet did some of the cruellest and some of not the least disgraceful things from mere childish want of realising the pacta conventa of the world." Shelley is pre-eminently the poet of lyric emotion, the subtle and most musical interpreter of vague spiritual longing and intellectual desire. His poems form together "the most sensitive," says Stopford Brooke, "the most imaginative, and the most musical, but the least tangible lyrical poetry we possess."

Wisdom & Quotes

• Death is the veil which those who live call life:

They sleep, and it is lifted.
- Prometheus Unbound

• All spirits are enslaved that serve things evil.

- Prometheus Unbound

• Familiar acts are beautiful through love.

- Prometheus Unbound

• All love is sweet,

Given or returned. Common as light is love,
And its familiar voice wearies not ever.
- Prometheus Unbound

• To know nor faith, nor love nor law; to be

Omnipotent but friendless is to reign.
- Prometheus Unbound

• My soul is an enchanted boat,

Which, like a sleeping swan, doth float
Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing.
- Prometheus Unbound

• The wise want love; and those who love want wisdom.

- Prometheus Unbound

• He gave man speech, and speech created thought,

Which is the measure of the universe.
- Prometheus Unbound

• Sometimes

The Devil is a gentleman.
- Peter Bell the Third

• Hell is a city much like London -

A populous and smoky city.
- Peter Bell the Third

• Teas,

Where small talk dies in agonies.
- Peter Bell the Third

• I arise from dreams of thee

In the first sweet sleep of night
When the winds are breathing low,
And the starts are shining bright.
- The Indian

• The earth and ocean seem

To sleep in one another's arms, and dream
Of waves, flowers, clouds, woods, rocks, and all that we
Read in their smiles, and call reality.
- Epipsychidion

• Nothing in the world is single;

All things by a law divine
In one spirit meet and mingle.
Why not I with thine?
- Love's Philosophy

• I met a traveler from an antique land

Who said: 'Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert…. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read.'
- Ozymandias

• 'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, yet Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
- Ozymandias

• Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.

- A Defense of Poetry

• Chameleons feed on light and air:

Poets' food is love and fame.
- An Exhortation

• Power, like a desolating pestilence,

Pollutes whate'er it touches.
- Queen Mab

• Throughout this varied and eternal world

Soul is the only element.
- Queen Mab

• Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!

Bird thou never wert,
That from Heaven, or near it,
Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.
- To a Skylark

• Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thoughts.

- To a Skylark

• I love all waste

And solitary places; where we taste the pleasure of
believing what we see
Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be.
- Julian and Maddalo

• O Wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,

Thou from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,
Yellow and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitude.
- Ode to the West Wind

• Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;

Destroyer and preserver;
Hear, oh, hear!
- Ode to the West Wind

• If winter comes, can spring be far behind?

- Ode to the West Wind

John Keble