Percy Bysshe Shelley Research Paper

Percy Bysshe Shelley. Who was he? A poet? A writer? We will never know. The era of all things, artistic, intellectual, and musical was the point of time for poet Percy Bysshe Shelley to be exposed to the entire world. His romantic take on words gave readers a mysterious kind of lust to draw them into all his famous works. He went through pain and heartbreak, but used it all to his advantage when writing novels and poetry. This essay will examine the life of, evaluate the work of, and examine the impact of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Percy Bysshe Shelley was born on August 4th, 1792, at Field Place near Horsham, Sussex. He was the elder son of Timothy and Elizabeth Shelley and the grandson of Bysshe Shelley (Bloom 3561). He had one brother, John, and four sisters, Elizabeth, Mary, Margaret, and Hellen (“Percy Bysshe Shelley” 3). It was said that above all siblings, he would be the member of the Shelley family to sit in Parliament one day. Field Place did not prepare him for the regimented discipline and the taunting boys of Syon House Academy. Shelley was subjected to the usual bullying, made all the worse by his failure to control his temper and his poor skills in fighting. Shelley spent two

His name forever linked with those of Byron and Keats, Shelley has come to symbolize the free and soaring spirit of humankind. Seeing and reading the work of Shelley showed another side of humankind that I never thought was possible. Paul Elmer More and Irving Babbitt attacked Romanticism in general and Shelley in particular for being simple, irrational, and dangerous(“Percy Bysshe Shelley” 7). In the twentieth century, however, Shelley’s literary reputation plunged to its nadir with the advent of the “new humanism” and the “new