from what i know is
Percy Bysshe Shelley, (born Aug. 4, 1792, Field Place, near Horsehair, Eng.—died July 8, 1822, at sea off Livonia, Tuscany [Italy]), English Romantic poet whose passionate search for personal love and social justice was gradually channeled from overt actions into poems that rank with the greatest in the English language. Shelley was the heir to rich estates acquired by his grandfather, Shelby (pronounced “Bush”) Shelley. Timothy Shelley, the poet’s father, was a weak, conventional man who was caught between an overbearing father and a rebellious son. The young Shelley was educated at Son House Academy (1802–04). And The poets of the next generation shared their predecessors’ passion for liberty (now set in a new perspective by the Napoleonic Wars) and were in a position to learn from their experiments. Percy Shelby Shelley in particular was deeply interested in politics, coming early under the spell of the anarchist views of William Godwin, whose Inquiry Concerning Political Justice had appeared in 1793. Shelley’s revolutionary ardor caused him to claim in his critical essay “A Defense of Poetry” (1821, published 1840) that “the most unfailing herald, companion, and follower of the awakening of a great people to work a beneficial change in opinion or institution, is poetry,” and that poets are “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” This fervor burns throughout the early Queen Mab (1813), the long Lao and Scythian (re titled The Revolt of Islam, 1818), and the lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound (1820). Shelley saw himself at once as poet and prophet, as the fine “Ode to the West Wind” (1819) makes clear. Despite his grasp of practical politics, however, it is a mistake to look for concreteness in his poetry, where his concern is with subtleties of perception and with the underlying forces of nature: his most characteristic images are of sky and weather, of lights and fires. His poetic stance invites the reader to respond with similar outgoing aspiration. It adheres to the Rousseau belief in an underlying spirit in individuals, one truer to human nature itself than the behavior evinced and approved by society. In that sense his material is transcendental and cosmic and his expression thoroughly appropriate. Possessed of great technical brilliance, he is, at his best, a poet of excitement and power.
