ESPANSIONI DI TESTO

MODULE B - Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) (p. 96)

TASK
Read the text below and make notes about Shelley's life and works.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, although a radical nonconformist in every aspect of his life and thought, emerged from a solidly conservative background. His ancestors had been Sussex aristocrats since early in the seventeenth century. He was educated at Eton and Oxford. He was slight of build, eccentric in manner, and unskilled in sports or fighting and, as a consequence, was mercilessly baited by older and stronger boys. Even then, he saw the petty tyranny of schoolmasters and schoolmates as representative of man's general inhumanity to man, and dedicated his life to a war against injustice and oppression. […]
At Oxford in the autumn 1810 he wrote a pamphlet with a friend, The Necessity of Atheism, which claimed that God's existence cannot be proved on empirical grounds. To his great shock and grief, he was expelled, terminating a university career which had lasted only six months.
Shelley went to London where he met Harriet Westbrook, the daughter of a well-to-do tavern keeper. He eloped with her to Edinburgh and married her against his conviction that marriage was a tyrannical and degrading social institution. He was then eighteen years of age, and his bride, sixteen. In February 1812, accompanied by Harriet's sister Eliza, they traveled to Dublin to distribute Shelley's Address to the Irish People and otherwise take part in the movement for Catholic emancipation and for amelioration of the oppressed and poverty-stricken people.
Back in London, Shelley became a disciple of the radical social philosopher William Godwin. […]
In the following spring, Shelley fell in love with the beautiful Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. He abandoned Harriet, fled to France with Mary (taking along her stepsister, Claire Clairmont) and invited Harriet to come live with them in the relationship of a sister. When he returned to London, Shelley found that the general public, his family, and most of his friends regarded him not only as an atheist and revolutionary but also as a gross immoralist. When two years later Harriet drowned herself, the Courts denied Shelley the custody of their two children. Shelley married Mary Godwin and in 1818 moved to Italy.
In Italy he resumed his restless existence, moving from town to town and house to house. His health was usually bad. Although the death of his grandfather in 1815 had provided a substantial income, he dissipated so much of it by his warm-hearted but improvident support of William Godwin, Leigh Hunt, and other indigent pensioners that he was constantly short of money and harried by creditors. Within nine months, in 1818-19, Clara and William, the beloved children of Percy and Mary Shelley, both died. This tragedy destroyed the harmony of the couple, which not even the birth of another son could restore.
In these desperate circumstances, in a state sometimes verging on despair, and knowing that he almost entirely lacked an audience, Shelley wrote his greatest works. In 1819 he completed his masterpiece Prometheus Unbound and a fine tragedy, The Cenci. He also wrote numerous lyric poems, an elegy on the death of Keats, Adonais, and a lyrical drama, Hellas. […]
When in 1820 the Shelleys settled finally at Pisa, they formed the "Pisan Circle" with a group of friends. […] The end came suddenly, and in a way previsioned in the ecstatic last stanza of Adonais, in which he had described his spirit as a ship driven by a violent storm out into the dark unknown. On July 8, 1822, Shelley and Edward Williams were sailing their open boat, the Don Juan, from Leghorn to their summer house near Lerici, in the Gulf of Spezia. A violent squall blew up and swamped the boat Their bodies were cremated and Shelley's ashes were buried in the Protestant Cemetery at Rome, near the graves of John Keats and William Shelley, the poet's young son.

(Abridged from The Norton Anthology of English Literature, W.W. Norton & Company, New York and London 1996.)