Shelly Flashcards
1
Q
What were Shelly’s liberal ideas?
A
- He was inspired by the French revolution and wanted to end the opposition of the ordinary people
- At Eton, Shelly read the works of a philosopher named William Godwin, which he consumed passionately and in which he became a fervent believer; the young man wholeheartedly embraced the ideals of liberty and equality espoused by the French Revolution, and devoted his considerable passion and persuasive power to convincing others of the rightness of his beliefs
- Shelley met fellow freshman Thomas Jefferson Hogg, and this meeting that was to change both their lives forever after, perhaps Hogg’s even more than Shelley’s. The two young men immediately became fast friends, each stimulating the imagination and intellect of the other in their animated discussions of philosophy, literature, science, magic, religion, and politics. In his biography of Shelley, Hogg recalled the time they spent in Shelley’s rooms, reading, discussing, arguing, and Shelley performing scientific experiments
- Shelley’s political pamphlets, attacked the oppressiveness of religious dogma and superstition as well as of customs and institutions such as the monarchy
- Shelley signed both pamphlets “The Hermit of Marlow.” The first suggests petitions to increase suffrage, along the lines of what would eventually be put into practice in the 1832 Reform Bill. The second pamphlet is a rhetorical tour de force in which Shelley chastises even liberals, borrowing a phrase from Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man: “We pity the plumage but forget the dying bird.” Shelley suggests that in the public outpour of mourning over the untimely death of Princess Charlotte, people, even the friends of liberty and reform, have neglected the executions of three labourers, who in turn become symbols of all the poor and the unjustly treated
2
Q
How was Shelly not successful?
A
- Shelley’s work did not receive huge commercial fame during his lifetime - only earned £40 for his poetry in total
3
Q
What was Shelly’s love life like?
A
- Percy eloped with Mary in 1814, leaving his pregnant wife Harriet and his daughter. She became an outcast and gave birth. Then she became pregnant again with her lover’s baby and was so depressed, she drowned herself in Hyde Park, Serpentine Lake in 1818 - “may you enjoy the happiness which you have deprived me of” (her suicide note)
- Percy didn’t like how Mary often retreated to the past, he wanted her to talk to him and listen to his ideas and poems. She blamed him (and herself) for Clara’s death and did her best to then avoid him
- At the age of nineteen, Shelley eloped with Harriet Westbrook, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a tavern keeper, whom he married despite his inherent dislike of the tavern and distrust of the institution of marriage
- He made the personal acquaintance of William Godwin in London, and promptly fell in love with Godwin’s daughter Mary Wollstonecraft, whom he was eventually able to marry
- In 1816, the Shelleys travelled to Switzerland to meet Lord Byron, the most famous, celebrated, and controversial poet of the era; the two men became close friends. After a time, they formed a circle of English expatriates in Pisa, traveling throughout Italy
- In 1822, Shelly drowned while sailing in a storm off the coast of Italy named after Don Juan (A poem by Byron) which has been rumoured to be suicide as he had suicidal tendencies and his first wife drowned in the serpentine
- In 1818, Shelley took his family to Italy where they moved from city to city. Two of the Shelley’s children died and Mary herself suffered a nervous breakdown
- Shelley and Mary were faced with the disasters of two suicides: Fanny Imlay, Mary’s half-sister and an admirer of Shelley, and Harriet, Shelley’s wife who was pregnant at the time. Since both women had been, at least at one time, in love with Shelley, Shelley and Mary must have felt in some measure responsible
4
Q
What was the Waterloo massacre?
A
In 1819, during a public meeting in St. Peter’s Fields (Manchester, England), cavalry charged into the crowd, killing 11. The purpose of the meeting was to protest the Corn Laws during poor economic conditions and limited political representation in the north. Troops attacked a gathering of 60,000 Manchester civilians meeting to hear speeches advocating parliamentary reform, he wrote ‘The Mask of Anarchy’, arguably the most vicious satirical poem ever written.
5
Q
What were Shelly’s views on religion?
A
- He went of Oxford in 1810 but was expelled in the following spring for authoring a pamphlet entitled The Necessity of Atheism because of the nature of conservative England
- He was doubtful about organised religion often turning to atheism therefore he represented the poet as Christ - like figure establishing as a secular replacement. Martyred by society and conventional values, the Christ figure is resurrected by the power of nature and his own imagination thus spreading his prophetic visions over the earth
- Mary’s Shelley’s father wrote radical political writing ‘William Godwin’s Political Justice’ (1693) which was against marriage, stating “Marriage is law, and the worst of all laws”, it is a “positive law” to “restrain our vices” but we should be free to form relationships “regulated by the dictates of reason and duty”, not the Church and state believing in liberty and equality
6
Q
What was Shelly’s childhood like?
A
- Percy Bysshe Shelley was born in 1792, into a wealthy Sussex family which eventually attained minor noble rank—the poet’s grandfather, a wealthy businessman, received a baronetcy in 1806. Timothy Shelley, the poet’s father, was a member of Parliament and a country gentleman
- At Eton, Shelly also developed his mischief making tendencies as he hid a bulldog in his teacher’s classroom
- Playful and imaginative, he devised games to play with his sisters and told ghost stories to an enrapt and willing-to-be-thrilled audience
- Shelley was often bullied and taunted with epithets such as “Mad Shelley” especially as he had violent tendencies by attempting to blow up a tree trunk with gunpowder to summon spirits and was interested in occult sciences and “Shelley the atheist,” a situation alleviated sometimes by the intervention of his older cousin, Tom Medwin, who was later to become one of Shelley’s first biographers
7
Q
What were Shelly’s views on the poet?
A
- He was convinced that his poetry could enact change but felt deeply unable to spread it
- Shelley defines poetry to include all of the arts and all creative endeavours that bring permanent beauty or goodness to the world. Shelley’s statement that “a Poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one” illustrates that poetic creations are not subservient to the vicissitudes of history but rather partake of the Platonic realm of permanent forms and ideas. The inspiration that endows imaginative poets with a momentary vision into the realm of the beautiful and the permanent is another manifestation of Shelley’s “intellectual beauty.” And yet Shelley argues that the social and moral benefits of poetry are real. Poetry can help moral progress keep pace with scientific and material progress, and as “the unacknowledged legislators of the World,” poets can indirectly influence social consciousness for the better
- Shelley’s poetry reflects a profound belief in the power of the human imagination. He viewed the imagination as a force capable of transcending boundaries, inspiring change, and shaping the world
- He saw the figure of the poet as a heroic figure as it had the power and duty to translate the truths of society through imagination that can allow them to spread their political messages. Whilst they are doomed to suffer because their visionary power isolates them from other men and critics, they will always be triumphant because their art is immortal; outlasting the tyranny of government, religion and society to inspire new generation
- Saw his poetry as necessary for spiritual and poetic self-regeneration and political regeneration
- On the other hand, he feels his imagination has creative power over nature placing them both as equal because imagination form sensory perceptions of nature affecting its existence
- Shelley was concerned with beauty, the passions, nature, political liberty, creativity, and the sanctity of the imagination.
- Shelley believed that poetry makes people and society better; he hoped would affect his readers sensuously, spiritually, and morally, all at the same time.
- Shelley argues, that the imagination is the source of sympathy, compassion, and love, enabling empathy.
- The poet (and, to some extent, the figure of Shelley himself) is a grand, tragic, prophetic hero with a deep, mystic appreciation and connection with the natural world. He has the power-and the duty-to translate these truths, through the use of his imagination, into poetry that the public can understand.
- Shelley felt that the poet suffered because they are isolated, misunderstood and suffocated by religion middle class values and government. However, the poet triumphs because his art is immortal, outlasting the tyranny of government, religion, and society and living on to inspire new generations.
8
Q
How does Shelly link to the romantics?
A
Shelley died when he was twenty-nine, Byron when he was thirty-six, and Keats when he was only twenty-six years old. To an extent, the intensity of feeling emphasized by Romanticism meant that the movement was always associated with youth, and because Byron, Keats, and Shelley died young
- Shelley (like Keats and Byron) was known for his sensuous aestheticism, where the ideal of human happiness is based upon beauty.
9
Q
What is Shelly’s view on nature?
A
- He had a great reverence for the beauty of nature and he felt closely connected to the power of nature but respected the sublime as illustrated in his poems. It causes all human joy, faith, goodness and pleasure as a source of poetic inspiration and divine truth
- Autumn is a common motif within his poetry as shows the juxtaposing view of nature as creative and destructive reflecting Shelly’s vision for political and social revolution
- Shelley recognises that nature is the cause of all human joy, faith, goodness, and pleasure, the source of poetic inspiration and divine truth. Nature also has the power to destroy. The poet can describe nature in different, original ways. The power of the human mind becomes equal to the power of nature. The experience of beauty in the natural world becomes a collaboration between the perceiver and the perceived. For this reason, he cannot attribute the power of nature or the sublime to the divine/God.
