Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley Biography
Shelley, born the heir to rich estates and the son of an Member of Parliament, went to University College, Oxford in 1810, but in March of the following year he and a friend, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, were both expelled for the suspected authorship of a pamphlet entitled The Necessity of Atheism.
In 1811 he met and eloped to Edinburgh with Harriet Westbrook and, one year later, went with her and her older sister first to Dublin, then to Devon and North Wales, where they stayed for six months into 1813. However, by 1814, and with the birth of two children, their marriage had collapsed and Shelley eloped once again, this time with Mary Godwin.
Along with Mary's step-sister, the couple travelled to France, Switzerland and Germany before returning to London where he took a house with Mary on the edge of Great Windsor Park and wrote Alastor (1816), the poem that first brought him fame.
In 1816 Shelley spent the summer on Lake Geneva with Byron and Mary who had begun work on her Frankenstein. In the autumn of that year Harriet drowned herself in the Serpentine in Hyde Park and Shelley then married Mary and settled with her, in 1817, at Great Marlow, on the Thames. They later travelled to Italy, where Shelley wrote the sonnet Ozymandias (written 1818) and translated Plato's Symposium from the Greek. Shelley himself drowned in a sailing accident in 1822.
Percy Bysshe Shelley Poems
The Best Poem Of Percy Bysshe Shelley
Ozymandias
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: `Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear --
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.'
Percy Bysshe Shelley Comments
Shelley, though largely unacknowledged then and now, is one of the greats. A better poet than Byron and far more prolific and wide-ranging and imaginative than John Keats, for all his loveliness. Please read my poem 'Seashells From The Seashore' about him and his struggle for recognition.
Percy Bysshe Shelley was an amazing poet and the more I read his poetry the more I realized his words and thoughts were from the other side, the musical heavens! Percy Bysshe Shelley inspired me to write poetry and not be afraid to write what I feel. Thank-you Percy Bysshe Shelley for sharing your talents to the world! Elizabeth Fontaine Grieco
What a load of crap. If he had something real to say, he could have said it in just one or two paragraphs. To long
ADONAIS Percy Bysshe Shelley was in the imperishable world of POEM
Who would not admire a great poet like Percy Bysshe Shelley! ! !
Percy Bysshe Shelley Quotes
I think that the leaf of a tree, the meanest insect on which we trample, are in themselves arguments more conclusive than any which can be adduced that some vast intellect animates Infinity.
It were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its colour and odour, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet. The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no flower—and this is the burthen of the curse of Babel.
Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.
Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.
Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.
The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself.
A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why.
In a drama of the highest order there is little food for censure or hatred; it teaches rather self-knowledge and self- respect.
Revenge is the naked idol of the worship of a semi-barbarous age.
A poet, as he is the author to others of the highest wisdom, pleasure, virtue, and glory, so he ought personally to be the happiest, the best, the wisest, and the most illustrious of men.
Their errors have been weighed and found to have been dust in the balance; if their sins were as scarlet, they are now white as snow: they have been washed in the blood of the mediator and the redeemer, Time.
Tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain.
A story of particular facts is a mirror which obscures and distorts that which should be beautiful; poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which it distorts.
Obscenity, which is ever blasphemy against the divine beauty in life,... is a monster for which the corruption of society forever brings forth new food, which it devours in secret.
Every epoch, under names more or less specious, has deified its peculiar errors.
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.
Yes, marriage is hateful, detestable. A kind of ineffable, sickening disgust seizes my mind when I think of this most despotic, most unrequited fetter which prejudice has forged to confine its energies.
The Galilean is not a favourite of mine. So far from owing him any thanks for his favour, I cannot avoid confessing that I owe a secret grudge to his carpentership.
Reviewers, with some rare exceptions, are a most stupid and malignant race. As a bankrupt thief turns thief-taker in despair, so an unsuccessful author turns critic.
Government is an evil; it is only the thoughtlessness and vices of men that make it a necessary evil. When all men are good and wise, government will of itself decay.
Love is free; to promise for ever to love the same woman is not less absurd than to promise to believe the same creed; such a vow in both cases excludes us from all inquiry.
The odious and disgusting aristocracy of wealth is built upon the ruins of all that is good in chivalry or republicanism; and luxury is the forerunner of a barbarism scarcely capable of cure.
It is impossible that had Buonaparte descended from a race of vegetable feeders that he could have had either the inclination or the power to ascend the throne of the Bourbons.
Constancy has nothing virtuous in itself, independently of the pleasure it confers, and partakes of the temporizing spirit of vice in proportion as it endures tamely moral defects of magnitude in the object of its indiscreet choice.
Chastity is a monkish and evangelical superstition, a greater foe to natural temperance even than unintellectual sensuality.
It is his weakness to be proud: he derives, from a comparison of his own extraordinary mind with the dwarfish intellects that surround him, an intense apprehension of the nothingness of human life.
Percy Bysshe Shelley Popularity
Percy Bysshe Shelley Popularity
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5/26/2022 11:20:42 PM # 1.0.0.966
percy shelly is the greatest poet of all time. His choice of words and the metaphors portrayed are fantastic. If you really want to read some of his greatest thoughts then read his fragments on this page