Birthday: Shelley the Romantic

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

Poet, activist

Shelley and Byron created the modern image of the Romantic poet who is such a genius no amount of self-indulgence and emotional carnage inflicted on others can earn more than a passing reproach. Educated at Eton- where he was harassed, daily, by a mob of students into “Shelley-baiting”- he entered University College, Oxford in 1810. Lecture attendance was voluntary- even today they are an adjunct to undergraduates’ tutorial studies- and Shelley was said to have attended only one, spending the rest of his time reading and writing. He produced two novels and several collections of verse; in 1811 he published a pamphlet titled The Necessity of Atheism. Called before the master of Univ, Shelley refused to recant, and the masters declined to forgive. Shelley was sent down in August, and by fall eloped to Scotland with a sixteen year-old classmate of one of his sisters.

“Poets are the natural legislators of the universe,” Shelley proclaimed, and his regular publication of provocative pamphlets advancing his program also retarded his success in verse. Publishers were afraid to publish his verses, fearing prosecution for blasphemy or sedition.

Bored by his wife, Shelley left her, pregnant, in 1814 and ran off with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, whose stepfather, William Godwin, constantly leeched off Shelley even after Shelley’s father cut him off at 19. The next eight years was a Grand Tour of performance art featuring  appearances by Byron (Mary’s stepsister, Claire, was jealous of Mary and went out to snag her own poet; when Byron tired of her, she angled to get him back by getting Mary and Percy to visit her in Geneva, then effected an introduction to Byron to get him back to Geneva). Various riotous scenes, including the writing of Mary’s Frankenstein followed, ended by Shelley’s drowning in a sailing accident in Italy, a month short of his 30th birthday.

Safely dead, Shelley began to be appreciated as a poet more than as a hell-raiser and political harebrain. By 1893 University College appreciated Shelley had become their most famous alumnus, and accepted the gift of a nude sculpture of Shelley in death commissioned by his daughter-in-law. A domed room was designed for it by the late Victorian Oxbridge architect, Basil Champneys. Even in death, the poet continues to be Shelley-baited: among the student pranks played on his memorial is the flooding of the room and its filling with goldfish. The college has since embarked on a series of acquisitions of Shelley writings and memorabilia to cement the relationship it once shunned.