Percy Bysshe Shelley The Perfect Romantic? ● Educated at Eton and ● Able to match wits with Oxford: mediocre student, Byron (the guy with the too busy for school bear in his dorm) ● Eloped at 19 ● Elegized John Keats ● Later married Mary ("Adonais") Wollstonecraft (Shelley). ● Deeply involved in ● Read widely and knew Revolutionary movements Shakespeare, Virgil, in Italy, Greece and Ireland Homer, Dante, Old and ● Drowned in a storm off the New Testament, Koran, coast of Italy Wordsworth, Spenser, ● After washing ashore 10 chapter and verse days later, he's cremated ● His learning was by Byron and others unparalleled amongst the Romantics Shelley the Atheist, Anti-Monarch ● While attending University College, Oxford he wrote the anonymous pamphlet The Necessity of Aetheism ● When he was caught by administrators he was expelled ● Wrote "Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things" — a long, anti-monarchical and anti-war poem printed in 1811. Rediscovered in 2006. ● While touring Ireland, he wrote his Address to the Irish People and was seen at several nationalist rallies. His activities earned him the unfavorable attention of the British government. The Death of Shelley Shelley's Grave ● Buried in the Protestant cemetery in Rome--near John Keats ● Epitaph from Ariel's song in Shakespeare's The Tempest: "Nothing of him that doth fade / But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange." ● The day after the news of his death reached England, the Tory (conservative) news paper The Courier gloated: "Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry, has been drowned, now he knows whether there is God or no." Ozymandias = Ramses II in "Exodus" Ramses II, Ozymandias Shelley's Ozymandias The Clash of Ideas? ●Compare and contrast Yeats’ "The Second Coming" and Shelley’s "Ozymandias". ●How do both poets refer to ideas of change? .