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Home , England in 1819, The Necessity of Atheism

(1792-1822)

Life.-

The son of a Whig squire, Percy Bysshe Shelley was born at Field Place, near Horsham, Sussex, on August 4, 1792. At Eton he rose in revolt against the fagging system, and by his eccentricities gained the name of “Mad Shelley.” At Oxford he joined in the production of a pamphlet on , for which he was expelled. In 1811 he married Harriet Westbrook, a schoolgirl whose troubles at home had stirred his ready sympathies. When he proved unfaithful, Harriet commited suicide. After her death he legitimized by marriage the relations already existing between him and Mary, the daughter of (1816). In 1818 he left England for Italy, where the short remainder of his life was spent. He was drowned by the capsizing of his boat on the Bay of Spezzia, July 8, 1822.

Works.- Shelley’s principal writings are: Verse.- (1813) Alastor, and Other Poems (1816) The Revolt of Islam (1818) Rosalind and Helen (1819) (1819) Prometheus Unbound (1820) (1821) ( 1821) (1822) Posthmous Poems (1824)

Prose.- Zastrozzi (1810) St. Irvyne (1811) The Necessity of Atheism (1811) Declaration of Rights ( a broadsheet, 1812) Refutation of Deism (1814) A Defence of Poetry (1821, published 1824)

Character.- Shelley was a good man of business but always very much of a child, visionary yet practical, with high ideals but little sense of moral responsibilities. He was guilty of conduct which we are bound to condemn, but despite errors of judgement and action, his was a pure and unselfish spirit. The keynote of his character was “enthusiasm for humanity.” He had, as he confessed, a passion for reforming the world, and, if his impatience with all the evils that are done under the sun led him in early years into the wildest extravagances, it must be remembered that his character was ripening at the time of his premature death. Views.- Alone among the English poets of his age, Shelley retained his faith in the Revolution. He believed that the world was already beginning to recover from “the revulsion occasioned by the atrocities of the demagogues and the reestablishment of successive tyrannies in France.” For a time the spirit of disenchantment and the forces of reaction had had full sway:

Hence gloom and misanthropy have become the characteristics of the age in which we live. … The influence has tainted the literature of the age with the hopelessness of the minds from which it flows. – (Preface to “The Revolt of Islam.”)

But the dawn of a new day was at hand:

Mankind appear to me to be emerging from their trance. I am aware, methinks, of a slow, gradual, silent change. - (Preface to “The Revolt of Islam.”)

Poetry he regarded as a moral agent of the greatest importance and power. It achieves its high purposes by its irresistible appeal to the imagination, and through that, to the sympathies:

The great secret of morals is love, or a going out of our nature and an identitification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively. He must put himself in the place of another and of many others. The pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination, and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause. – (A Defence of Poetry.)

The function of the poet is, therefore, to dilate the imagination and arouse the sympathies. But this function must not be confused with the direct inculcation of specific doctrines:

It is a mistake to suppose that I dedicate my poetical compositions solely to the direct enforcement of reform, or that I consider them in any degree as containing a reasoned system on the theory of human life. Didactic poetry is my abhorrence .… My purpose has hitherto been simply to familiarize the highly refined imagination of the more select classes of poetical readers with beautiful idealisms of moral excellence, aware that until the mind can love, and admire, and trust, and hope, and endure, reasoned principles of moral conduct are seeds cast upon the highway of life. – (Preface to “Prometheus Unbound.”)

Poems.- With few exceptions Shelley’s poems fall into two classes – the personal and the humanitarian. Personal Poetry.- To this class belong most of Shelley’s wonderful lyrics – Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, Lines written among the Euganean Hills, Stanzas in Dejection, The Skylark, , . His longer personal poems include: Alastor, descriptive of the unsatisfied yearnings and death of a solitary poet, largely autobiographical, yet containing Shelley’s rebuke to those “ who attempt to live without human sympathy.” , a poem in the familiar style, in which Julian stands for the writer himself, and Maddalo for Byron. Epipsychidion is a poem of supreme beauty of diction and versification, addressed to an Italian girl, Emilia Viviani, whom for the moment he had idealized into a symbol of perfection. Humanitarian Poetry.- Queen Mab, a violent and immature expression of revolutionary faith, has some passages of fine feeling and imagination. It preaches the destruction of Christianity and all institutions, including property and marriage. Its philosophy is derived from Godwin’s Political Justice. Its irregular blank verse is founded on Southey’s Thalaba. The Revolt of Islam, a long, rambling, narrative poem, was written to express the poet’s unwavering faith in revolutionary principles, and his hope for the salvation of mankind. In it “love is celebrated everywhere as the sole law which should govern the moral world” (Preface). Its hero and heroine are types of unselfish devotion to the ideal, and become martyrs for the cause of man. In Prometheus Unbound, a magnificent choral drama of the regeneration of humanity, Prometheus symbolizes man. Jupiter is the personification of oppression, his overthrow by Hercules is the destruction of despotism by strength. The marriage of Prometheus with Asia is the union of the mind of man with the spirit of love which pervades the universe, and with this union the reign of perfect love on earth begins. Hellas is another lyrical drama inspired by the Greek war of independence. To these may be added , , and Song to the Men of England, in which Shelley appeals directly to the English people, and strikes the popular note. Other poems.- The Cenci, a tragedy dealing with a subject too monstrous for the modern stage, contains passages of dramatic power to rival which we have to go back to the greatest Elizabethans. Adonais: an Elegy on the Death of Keats, one of the finest of English elegies, is noteworthy among other things for its passionate expression of Shelley’s pantheistic faith. The Witch of Atlas, a fantasy of great poetic beauty, describes creative imagination and its influence among men. Characteristics.- As a lyric poet Shelley is among the very greatest. His song is pure inspiration, a thing all lightness, melody, and grace. With such work formal criticism has little concern: to analyse is futile, to praise is superfluous. As a poet of man he dwells habitually in a sphere far removed from that of ordinary passions and motives, and in a rarefied atmosphere which it is sometimes difficult to breathe. His verse overflows with his splendid enthusiasm for humanity, but his individual creations are but shadows in a shadow world. None the less he always makes love – love for the individual as well as for the race – the one great agency in the regeneration of mankind. The contrast at this point between Shelley and Byron is eminently suggestive: Byron’s heroes are haughty misanthropes, who live entirely for themselves, while Shelley’s are noble, unselfish enthusiasts who, like Laon and Prometheus, willingly sacrifice themselves for the sake of man. Shelley’s poetry of nature lacks the intimate familiarity with earth’s common things which we find in Wordsworth and Keats, but it is especially great in the treatment of large landscapes. For him as for Wordsworth Nature is the incarnation of the divine. His atheism was, in fact, only the denial of the mechanical deity of the current theology: “the hypothesis of a pervading Spirit co-eternal with the universe remains unshaken” (Note to Queen Mab).In his earlier years Shelley put no check upon his opulent imagination, and his work is often overburdened with and made obscure by the profusion of his thick-coming fancies. The increasing restraint of his later writing attests his steady progress in his art.