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Elective English–I

Notes and his political and social views to achieve fame during his lifetime, recognition of his
significance grew steadily following his death. PB Shelley was a key member of a close circle
of visionary poets and writers that included Lord Byron, Leigh, Hunt, Thomas Love Peacock
and his second wife, Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein.

Shelley is perhaps best known for such classic poems as Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind, To
a Skylark, Music, When Soft Voices Die, The Cloud and The Masque of Anarchy, etc. which are
among the most popular and critically acclaimed poems in the English language. His major
works, however, are long visionary poems that include Queen Mab (later reworked as The
Daemon of the World), Alastor, The Revolt of Islam, Adonaïs, the unfinished work The Triumph of
Life; and the visionary verse dramas The Cenci (1819) and Prometheus Unbound (1820). The latter
is widely considered one of Shelley’s most fully realised works.
Shelley’s early profession of atheism (in the tract “The Necessity of Atheism”) led to his
expulsion from Oxford and branded him as a radical agitator and thinker, setting an early
pattern of marginalisation and ostracism from the intellectual and political circles of his time.
His close circle of admirers, however, included the most progressive thinkers of the day,
including his future father-in-law, philosopher William Godwin. Though Shelley’s poetry and
prose output remained steady throughout his life, most publishers and journals declined to
publish his work for fear of being arrested themselves for blasphemy or sedition. Shelley
never lived to see the extent of his success and influence, which would reach down to the present
day not only in the literary canon, but in major movements in social and political thought.
Shelley became an idol of the next three or four generations of poets, including important
Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite poets such as Robert Browning, and Dante Gabriel Rosetti. He
was admired by Oscar Wilde, Thomas Hardy, George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell, W. B.
Yeats, Karl Marx, Upton Sinclair and Isadora Duncan. Henry David Thoreau’s civil disobedience
and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s passive resistance were apparently influenced and inspired
by Shelley’s non-violence in protest and political action, although Gandhi does not include
him in his list of mentors.

About his Life
Education

The eldest legitimate son of Timothy on Shelley—a Whig Member of Parliament—and his
wife, a Sussex landowner, Shelley was born on 4 August 1792 at Field Place, Broadbridge
Heath, near Horsham, West Sussex, England. He had four younger sisters and one much
younger brother. He received his early education at home, tutored by Reverend Evan Edwards
of nearby Warnham. His cousin and lifelong friend Thomas Medwin, who lived nearby, recounted
his early childhood in his “The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley”. It was a happy and contented
childhood spent largely in country pursuits such as fishing and hunting.
In 1802, he entered the Syon House Academy of Brentford, Middlesex. In 1804, Shelley entered
Eton College, where he fared poorly, subjected to an almost daily mob torment his classmates
called “Shelley-baits”. Surrounded, the young Shelley would have his books torn from his
hands and his clothes pulled at and torn until he cried out madly in his high-pitched “cracked
soprano” of a voice.
On 10 April 1810, he matriculated at University College, Oxford. Legend has it that Shelley
attended only one lecture while at Oxford, but frequently read sixteen hours a day. His first
publication was a Gothic novel, Zastrozzi (1810), in which he vented his early atheistic worldview
through the villain Zastrozzi. In the same year, Shelley, together with his sister Elizabeth,
published Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire. While at Oxford, he issued a collection of verses

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