The Western Lit Survival Kit by Sandra Newman

Author:Sandra Newman [Newman, Sandra]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101554081
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2012-01-02T16:00:00+00:00

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY (1792–1822)

Shelley really, really couldn’t do life. At Eton, he was routinely beaten up for being a sissy. At Oxford, he wrote and circulated a pamphlet called “The Necessity of Atheism.” Good-bye, Oxford. Then he eloped with a sixteen-year-old girl to free her from the tyranny of her father, despite the fact that he didn’t especially like her. By this time, his own father, who was his only means of support, was barely speaking to him.

A few years later, he left his wife—with two children, and another on the way—to run away with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin… and her sister Claire. Since Mr. Godwin was Shelley’s most influential friend in London, this was not a sharp career move. Still worse, Shelley’s abandoned wife drowned herself in the Serpentine, and the one Godwin sister he hadn’t abducted, Fanny, poisoned herself. Then Shelley and Mary had an open marriage which amounted to him cheating while Mary stayed home and had a series of babies who all died. Finally he took a boat out with two friends, hit a storm, and was killed at twenty-nine. Ten out of ten!

He was probably the least successful of all the Romantic poets. Despite being good friends with international superstar Byron, he is estimated to have only earned forty pounds from all his writings. Of course, forty pounds was worth more in those days. You could still buy an okay sofa for that money, for instance. Shelley could have bought a sofa, and called it the poetry sofa, and then he and Mary Shelley could have sat on it saying, Well, this was certainly worth a whole life’s work!

Shelley was the most idealistic of the Romantics. He was an egalitarian, a feminist, a pacifist, a believer in free love, and a vegetarian. His poetry is all waterfalls, Love, and Beauty, and his only mode is ecstatic hyperbole. In “Ode to a Skylark,” the skylark’s song is more lovely than “all that ever was joyous and clear and fresh.” Furthermore, Shelley assumes that because it has a pretty voice, the bird is perfectly happy—and wise too! Specifically, it knows more about death “than we Mortals dream.” If you think about it, Shelley is also suggesting it is immortal.

Shelley had a far greater interest in science than the other Romantics (although his interest clearly didn’t extend to ornithology). Scientific ideas repeatedly crop up in his poems, looking a little surprised and uncertain as to how they got there. Then they’re washed away by a waterfall with chunks of Love and Beauty floating in it.

Sometimes Shelley’s philosophy falls into a hopeless tangle of straining thoughtness. Sometimes his images are so hyper-sublime, it’s like drinking a gallon of honey. Still, the poetry is beautiful. It’s beautiful, no matter how stupid it is—like a skylark, or Jessica Alba. For long stretches, it’s hard to tear yourself away, even when you stopped understanding a word of it two pages before.

His short poems—“Ode to the West Wind,” “Ode to a Skylark,” “Ozymandias,” etc.—are the place to start.

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