Percy+Bysshe+Shelley+Biography

media type="custom" key="12879100"Several months after his expulsion, Shelly eloped to Scotland with Harriet Westbrook, an acquaintance of his sisters. Their happiness was short-lived, however, as Percy’s insistence on an open marriage strained the relationship. Of this openness, Shelley is quoted as saying “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”(Percy Shelley on Love and Marriage). Despite marital strife, The Shelley’s first child, Ianthe, was born in 1813, followed by their first son, Charles, in 1814. Percy Shelley also during this time finished his first large poetic work entitled //Queen Mab; A Philisophical Poem: With Notes.// In addition, he frequently gave radical speeches and published rhetoric that supported Ireland’s Catholic Emancipation from England. It was around this period that Percy Shelley struck up a relationship with William Godwin. Godwin was a revolutionary English journalist whose work had influenced Shelley in his youth, and husband of the late woman’s rights activist, Mary Wollstonecraft. While visiting in London, Shelley fell deeply in love with his daughter Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. Growing apart for some time, Percy finally left Harriet for good in 1814, while she was still pregnant with their second child. media type="custom" key="12879114"Shelley and Godwin lived together near London, where he wrote //Alstor, or the Spirit of Solitude//, for two years before moving Lake Geneva, Switzerland. The couple rented a house next to Lord Byron, with whom Shelley soon befriended. The relationship shared by the two men served to inspire their poetic endeavors, with Shelley completing his “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” in 1816, and Lord Byron inspired to write his masterpiece //Don Juan.// This newfound happiness did not last long, as the suicides of both Mary’s sister, Fanny, and Percy’s estranged wife, Harriet just two weeks before they were to be married left the couple reeling. media type="custom" key="12879106"Beginning in 1818, Percy and Mary left for Italy, first arriving in Venice to reconnect with Lord Byron. Percy Shelley continued to write poetry while touring the country, finding inspiration for his work through the discovery of new places and people. While in Rome, he managed to get published two of his most profound works, //Prometheus Unbound// and //Masque of Anarchy//. During their travels, the couple’s two young children both passed away, William to a fever in 1818, and Clara while moving between homes in 1819, and Mary gave birth to a new son, Percy Florence Shelley, in November of that year. The couple continued this nomadic existence, when in 1822, after a meeting with British editor Leigh Hunt about an idea to create a new literary journal, Shelley’s schooner was lost in a freak storm in the Gulf of Spezia near Lerici, Italy. The accident occurred less than a month before his thirtieth birthday, on July 8, 1822. Shelley’s body later washed ashore, and was cremated on the beach shortly thereafter. Doubts were raised as to whether the storm was the true cause of the small ships demise, as it exhibited a sizeable puncture mark in one side, as if it were intentionally rammed by a much larger vessel. To be sure, “a rumor, not strictly verified and certainly not refuted, exists that an aged Italian seaman on his deathbed confessed that he had been one of the crew of the fatal felucca, and that the collision was intentional, as the men had plotted to steal a sum of money supposed to be on the "Don Juan", in charge of Lord Byron” (Percy Bysshe Shelley).

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