PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY AS A ROMANTIC POET

AND
AN INSIGHT INTO HIS ‘SKYLARK’
 ROMANTICISM
• Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in Europe towards the end of
18th century and in most areas was at its peak in the period from 1800 to 1850.
• Partly a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, it was also a revolt against aristocratic social and political norms
of the Age of Enlightenment and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature.
• Romanticism reached beyond the rational and classicist ideals to elevate a revived medievalism and elements of
art and nature.
 WHO WAS SHELLEY?
• Percy Bysshe Shelley was the most revolutionary and non-conformist of the Romantic poets. He was an
individualist and idealist who rejected the institutions of family, church, marriage and the Christian faith and
rebelled against all forms of tyranny. His ideas were anarchic and he was considered dangerous by the
conservative society of the time. Many of his poems addressed the social and political issues.
• Along with Lord Byron and John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley is among the most respected and admired of the
second generation of English Romantic poets.
• While his childhood was decidedly happy and rustic, his atheism and radical politics led to his expulsion from
college and estrangement from his family at an early age.
• He is perhaps best known, though, as the husband of the novelist Mary Shelley; the author of Frankenstein, a
novel which Shelley himself now credited with co-authoring.
• Shelley’s life was considered controversial for his time, especially given his profounded leftist political ideals
and the abandonment of his first wife in favour of a women named Mary Goodwin who would become his
second wife.
 SHELLEY IN ITALY
• Though he began composing and publishing poetry at a young age, Shelley’s career as a poet did not truly get
underway until he met the English poet Lord Byron in 1816.
• This meeting resulted in a life-long friendship between the two that served to inspire and influence some of his
finest poetry including his great poems ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ and ‘Mont Blanc’.
• Shelley was also a friend of the poet of the Romantic age, John Keats, for whom he wrote the elegy poem
‘Adonis’.
 DEATH AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• Shelley drowned a month before is 30 th birthday in a supposed boating accident that many consider to be a
possible murder by his political rivals.
• Unlike Lord Byron, though, Shelley did not receive full critical and popular recognition until after his death.
• Several generations of later poets and intellectuals like Karl Marx, George Bernard Shaw and William Butler
Yeats were inspired by Shelley’s political and social idealism and radicalism.
• In his most famous work – ‘A Defense Of Poetry’ he expresses his reaction against Thomas Peacock who wrote
an essay – ‘Four Ages Of Poetry’ in which he criticized poetry by telling people to stop wasting time on it.
• Shelley says in his essay – “Poetry turns all things to loveliness; it exalts the beauty of that which is the most
beautiful, and it adds beauty to that which is most deformed : it marries exultation and horror, grief and pleasure,
eternity and change, it subdues to union under its light yoke all irreconcilable things.”
 INSIGHT INTO SHELLEY’S SKYLARK
• The Skylark is a symbol of happiness and true joy. It is not just a bird, but a divine creature which unfolds the
creative impulse of Shelley. This brings out Shelley’s quest for ideal love and ideal beauty.
• ‘To a Skylark’ is however, not a description of a particular occasion, or a particular bird; rather, it is a search for
something elusive, something which cannot be captured in words.
• He personifies the Skylark that it has feelings to pour as a human being. The bird in the poem is personified with
emotions which is an important part of the romantic trend. It is an emotion which flows and flows together with
it’s singing, creating an art which is natural.
• Shelley compares the song of the bird to the abundant spontaneous art, to the rain of melody, cloud of fire and so
on. He also remarks in the ode that when the night was dark and lonely, it is the moon which shines her beams to
make the lonely night lovely, so is the song of the Skylark.
 CONCLUSION

• Shelley is a poet of ideas and of conviction, he is a passionate Crusader of political and social
change. Symbols which are intense and mysterious take over all of his poetry. He sees the latent
potential in things and human beings, he combines social thought with philosophy, science and
secular ethics.