Percy Bysshe Shelley (August 4, 1792 - July 8, 1822) - Poet, philosopher, revolutionary, the patron of all Romantic Poets

and of all artists with beating hearts and breathing souls. - Painting by the English marine painter Alfred Clint (1807-1883).

For Shelley... One hundred ninety years ago, today, you passed through the ethereal veil to the other side. Yet your voice remains with us. Your words as true today as then. I have heard it said that no one wants to be a romantic anymore, everyone wants peace. But I much prefer your defense of poetry. I much prefer your youthful conscience to that of the cautiousness of age. We miss you Percy, we miss you with hearts full of Romantic idealism.

Poets Never Sleep

Poets never sleep For daylight is too short to weep Darkness alone our resolve seeks The world needs a conscience, a soul that speaks Watchful, Poets are From beside and from afar Tired like larks chained in a cage The hand that wipes the tears, shakes a fist in rage We dream when the sun blinds us after a sleepless night But it is the dusk that invigorates the fight The Muse is a Mistress without shame

Forget glory, forget even fame The labors of Poets are those of Sisyphus Or perhaps the toils of Jan Hus Were a strange lot, we Poets, sleepless and lost Handed a blank page we fill it at bloods cost A collaboration with the dead The loss of bed and pillow for words to be read And if we run out of room on the sheet of paper There is always the night from which to borrow later Poets never sleep Someone has to sing, mourn, weep.

July 8, 2012 - Konrad Tademar

"The cremation funeral of Shelley" (1889) by the French painter and illustrator Louis douard Fournier (1857-1917) portraying the sea-side cremation of Percy Bysshe Shelley attended by Edward John Trelawny (November 13, 1792 - August 13, 1881) - the novelist, James Henry Leigh Hunt (October 19, 1784 - August 28 1859) the Poet, and Lord George Gordon Byron (January 22, 1788 - April 19, 1824) - the Poet.

In 1821, one year before Percy Bysshe Shelley left our world, he penned his artistic thesis A Defence of Poetry the central tenet of which is that Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. He left this work as a warning and as an instruction set for the Poets who were to follow in his tradition. That the purpose of Poets is clear. Shelley was part of the Romantic movement, but far from being only an idealist, or dreamer, he was also a keen student of the failure of mankind: for most of humanity happiness and safety is more important than doing the right thing. That is why God gave man a conscience that conscience in the social organism is fulfilled by the artists and principle among them the Poets.