Brenda Weston, age 16, of Biloxi, Miss., for her question:
WHY DO WE REMEMBER POET PERCY SHELLEY?
Percy Shelley was one of the great English lyric poets. Although he was born almost 200 years ago, in 1792, he is still remembered and respected today because he experimented with many literary styles and he had a lasting influence on many later writers, particularly Robert Browning, Algernon Charles Swinburne, William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw and Thomas Hardy.
Shelley's poems are emotionally direct, but difficult to understand intellectually. Much of his poetry is autobiographical.
Shelley's spiritual attitudes were intensely personal and tended to oppose traditional Christian views. He felt that spiritual truth was not based on either supernatural revelation or natural experience. Instead, he thought truth could be understood by the imagination alone.
Shelley was born in Sussex, England into a wealthy and politically prominent family. He had a very stormy career at Eton College and Oxford University, from which he was expelled at the age of 19 for writing a pamphlet called "The Necessity of Atheism."
He eloped with a 16 year old girl but the marriage didn't last. He married again when he was 24. His second wife was another 16 year old girl: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. She was the daughter of philosopher William Godwin.
Later on, Mary wrote "Frankenstein," the very famous and popular horror novel. She wrote the book at the suggestion of her husband and the poet Lord Byron.
Shelley's most ambitious poem is a lyrical drama called "Prometheus Unbound." In it Shelley attempted to combine his imaginative faith with his hopes for mankind. Like much of Shelley's work, this play is based on classical Greek models.
Shelley's poetry became somber after the revolutionary hope expressed in "Prometheus Unbound." His themes showed a conflict between desire and the inability to fully realize such desire.
In 1821, Shelley wrote his famous essay "A Defence of Poetry." The work is valuable for its insights into every poet's general ideas and Shelley's views on the role of imagination in poetry.
Whether Shelley had begun to find some definite faith, philosophically or otherwise, we do not know, but his final poems are as grim and sorrowful as any he wrote.
His final love lyrics are serene only in their hopelessness. According to his powerful unfinished poem on human defeat, "The Triumph of Life," good and the means of accomplishing good cannot be reconciled.
However grim his final vision, he always looks forward toward the hope of inspiration.
Poet Shelley died in 1822 at the young age of 30.