Monday, January 3, 2011

A Deeper View of Percy Shelley's Life and Poetry



(Please excuse the poetry reading (“A Lament”) in the middle of the video, it looks a little ridiculous.)



He was expelled from Oxford after writing The Necessity of Atheism and Other Essays due to the religious rules of the school who thought a natural look at the creation of the Earth and events that occur was outrageous. His first marriage was unsuccessful, although his second marriage to Marcy Wollstonecraft-Shelley was of great success. She was also an author and published many literature pieces, one of those being, the novel, Frankenstein. When Shelley was twenty-seven, he went sailing in the Gulf of Spezia and become caught in a storm, this trip was unsuccessful as his body and two others were found nine days later. Admirers laid his body to rest, along Shelley was Lord Byron. There is a legend that a pirate called Trelawny, among the admirers present, took Shelley’s heart from his body and gave it to Mary Shelley before burning his corps. It is said that his heart still remains in a jar among literature and romantic disciples.
As said to be the spiritual leader of Romantic Poets, he really leads the artistic vision by displaying nature and imagination through his writing. Shelley also shares the view that the true nature of the soul is in our divine imagination with William Blake. For Shelley, imagination is God, along with nature and there is no outstanding God that was the creator of all. During Shelley’s time, this belief of nature and imagination was not easily accepted among others and often caused a difficult life for those who had these beliefs. Shelley rejected rationality theories in pursuit of his ultimate romantic ideals. No other English poet of Shelley’s time emphasized the connection between beauty, nature, imagination and goodness like he did. Shelley believed that poetry makes people and society better; which he hoped his poetry would affect his readers in all possible ways.
Percy and his wife Mary both expressed a gratefulness of the natural world and its powers. They both shared a great hobby of composing literature and are both well-known for their work. Although Percy Shelley’s life was ended early, he had a very successful writing career along with a great success to portray the natural world and its beauty.

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