Percy Bysshe Shelley (Part One) Writers of the Romanticism Era often expressed a spontaneous outpouring of feelings through nature-related symbols and imagery. Percy Shelley was no exception to other Romantic writers. He used impulses of powerful feelings to express the inevitable change that everything in the universe undergoes(Elmer 3). From the very beginning of his career as a published writer at the age of seventeen, Shelley has evoked either the strongest vehemence or the warmest praise, bordering on worship(Elmer 7). More than any other English Romantic writer, Shelley’s life and reputation have had a history and life of their own apart from the reputation of his various works. Percy Shelley was a rebellious writer. Many of the things that he had written didn’t really follow the social standards of his time. Many times, he would call something out or …show more content…
Percy was born into a wealthy family and privately educated at Eton and there he began to read radical writers such as Tom Paine and William Godwin. Shelley was expelled from Oxford in 1811 for writing and circulating a pamphlet entitled ‘The Necessity of Atheism’. He had a chance of reinstatement, but this would have come at a cost, he would have had to refute the message in the pamphlet and declare himself a Christian, which he refused. Percy eloped twice in his life, once at 19 to Scotland to marry sixteen year old Harriet Westbrook, and again at twenty-two to France with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, daughter of British philosopher William Godwin. In 1814, Shelley fell in love with Mary, the 16-year-old daughter of writers William Godwin (a friend of Shelley's) and Mary Wollstonecraft. The couple travelled together in Europe and spent the summer of 1816 at Lake Geneva with Lord Byron. Shelley wrote poetry and Mary conceived the idea for her novel 'Frankenstein' and they had two beautiful children and his wife mary had a few