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Unit 14: Ode to the West Wind by PB Shelley

to write his Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, often considered his first significant production since Notes
Alastor. A tour of Chamonix in the French Alps inspired Mont Blanc, a poem in which Shelley
claims to have pondered questions of historical inevitability (determinism) and the relationship
between the human mind and external nature. Shelley also encouraged Byron to begin an epic
poem on a contemporary subject, advice that resulted in Byron’s composition of Don Juan. In
1817, Claire gave birth to a daughter by Byron, Alba, later renamed Allegra, whom Shelley
offered to support, making provisions for her and for Claire in his will.

Two suicides and a second marriage

After Shelley and Mary’s return to England, Fanny Imlay, Mary’s half-sister and Claire’s step-
sister, despondent over her exclusion from the Shelley household and perhaps unhappy at
being omitted from Shelley’s will, travelled from Godwin’s household in London to kill herself
in Wales in early October. On 10 December 1816, the body of Shelley’s estranged wife Harriet
was found in an advanced state of pregnancy, drowned in the Serpentine in Hyde Park,
London. Shelley had generously provided for her and their children in his will and had given
her a monthly allowance as had her father. It is thought that Harriet, who had left her children
with her sister Eliza and had been living alone under the name of Harriet Smith, mistakenly
believed herself to have been abandoned by her new lover, 36-year-old, Lieutenant Colonel
Christopher Maxwell, who had been deployed abroad, after a landlady refused to forward his
letters to her. On 30 December 1816, a few weeks after Harriet’s body was recovered, Shelley
and Mary Godwin were married. The marriage was intended, in part, to help secure Shelley’s
custody of his children by Harriet and also to placate Godwin, who had coldly refused to
speak to his daughter for two years, and who now effusively received the couple. The courts,
however, awarded custody of Shelley and Harriet’s children to foster parents.
The Shelleys took up residence in the village of Marlow, Buckinghamshire, where a friend of
Percy’s, Thomas Love Peacock, lived. Shelley took part in the literary circle that surrounded
Leigh Hunt, and during this period he met John Keats. Shelley’s major production during this
time was Laon and Cythna; or, The Revolution of the Golden City, a long narrative poem in which
he attacked religion and featured a pair of incestuous lovers. It was hastily withdrawn after
only a few copies were published. It was later edited and reissued as The Revolt of Islam in
1818. Shelley wrote two revolutionary political tracts under the nom de plume, “The Hermit of
Marlow.” On Boxing Day 1817, presumably prompted by travellers’ reports of Belzoni’s success
(where the French had failed) in removing the ‘half sunk and shattered visage’ of the so-called
‘Young Memnon’ from the Ramesseum at Thebes, Shelley and his friend Horace Smith began
a poem each about the Memnon or ‘Ozymandias,’ Diodorus’s ‘King of Kings’ who in an
inscription on the base of his statue challenged all comers to ‘surpass my works’. Within four
months of the publication of Ozymandias (or Rameses II) his seven-and-a-quarter ton bust
arrived in London, just too late for Shelley to have seen it.

Italy

Early in 1818, the Shelleys and Claire left England in order to take Claire’s daughter, Allegra,
to her father Byron, who had taken up residence in Venice. Contact with the older and more
established poet encouraged Shelley to write once again. During the latter part of the year, he
wrote Julian and Maddalo, a lightly disguised rendering of his boat trips and conversations
with Byron in Venice, finishing with a visit to a madhouse. This poem marked the appearance
of Shelley’s “urbane style”. He then began the long verse drama Prometheus Unbound, a re-
writing of the lost play by the ancient Greek poet Aeschylus, which features talking mountains
and a petulant spirit who overthrows Jupiter. Tragedy struck in 1818 and 1819, when Shelley’s

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