Percy Bysshe Shelley was an English Romantic poet born in 1792 in Horsham, Sussex. He came from a wealthy family and attended Eton College then Oxford University, from which he was expelled for writing an atheist pamphlet. As an idealist, Shelley imagined a world without oppression and attempted to fulfill this vision through his poetry. Some of his most famous works include Ozymandias, The Cloud, and Prometheus Unbound. He spent the last years of his life in Italy before dying in 1822 at the age of 30.
Survey of English and American Literature-Shelley and Keats.pdf
1. PERCY
SHELLEY
1792-1822
Percy Bysshe Shelley
English poet
Born: 4th of August 1792, Horsham, Sussex, England
Died: 8th of July 1822, Lerici, Kingdom of Sardinia
(Italy)
Literary period: Romantic Movement
Genre: Romantic poetry
2. THE LIFE OF
PERCY SHELLEY
Born to a very wealthy family at Field Place, near
Horsham, Sussex, England. The son of Timothy and
Elizabeth Shelley.
As the eldest of six children, Percy stood in line not only to
inherit his grandfather's estate but also to sit in the
Parliament one day.
He attended Eton College, where he began writing poetry, and
went on to Oxford University. His first publication was a
Gothic novel, Zastrozzi (1810), in which he voiced his own
heretical and atheistic opinions through the villain Zastrozzi.
After less than a year at Oxford, he was expelled for writing
and circulating a pamphlet promoting atheism.
3. THE LIFE OF
PERCY SHELLEY
As an idealist, Shelley imagined a world without
poverty and oppression, and where justice prevailed.
He attempted at fulfilling these aspirations through
poetry.
In March 1818, he went to Italy and there spent the last
four years of his life.
At 19, he eloped with Harriet Westbrook, whom he
abandoned while she was pregnant with their second child
to live with another woman, Mary Godwin(16 y/o).
Considered an atheist, immoral, and non-conformist, he
was reviled in England.
4. LITERARY WORKS
Love's Philosophy The Cloud
The Masque of Anarchy
Music, When Soft Voices Die
Alastor, or The Spirit of
Solitude
The Cloud
The Triumph of Life
The Revolt of Islam
Julian and Maddalo Zastrozzi
St. Irvyne
Epipsychidion
5. MAJOR WORK I met a Traveler 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!
No thing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that Colossal Wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
7. THE LIFE
OF JOHN KEATS
The eldest of four children of Thomas and Francis
Jennings Keats.
After John's father died, he had close emotional ties with his
sister, Fanny, and brothers, George and Tom all throughout
his life.
After his mother's second marriage's breakup, Keats siblings
lived with their widowed grandmother at Edmonton,
Middlesex.
When he attended a school at Enfield, there he met Charles
Cowden Clarke who have encouraged his literary aspirations.
Charles introduced young Keats to the poetry of Edmund
Spenser and thr Elizabethans that were his earliest models.
8. THE LIFE
OF JOHN KEATS
In 1810, Keat's mother died, and their grandmother put
their affairs into the hands of a guardian, Richard Abbey.
Under Abbey's initiation, John Keats was apprenticed to a
surgeon at Edmonton in 1811.
In 1814, he broke off his apprenticeship and went to London,
where he worked as a dresser, or junior house surgeon, at
Guy's and St. Thomas' hospitals.
By that time, his literary interests had solidy, and after 1817 he
devoted himself entirely to petry.
His long Endymion appeared in the same year (1818) as the
first symptoms of the tuberculosis that would kill him at age
25.
9. LITERARY WORKS
The Eve of St. Agnes
Ode on Melancholy
Ode to Psyche
La Belle Dame sans Merci
Endymion
When I Have Fears
Lamia
Ode on Indolence
Hyperion
The Fall of Hyperion
The Poems (of John Keats)
Isabella
Human Seasons
Fancy
10. MAJOR WORK First Stanza
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.
11. MAJOR WORKS
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Endymion
• Keats explores ideas about nature
and our relationship to it; about
myth and history; and about
melancholy and desire.
• He also expresses his deep belief
in the importance of beauty for its
own sake.
