PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

BIOGRAPHY

Percy Bysshe Shelley was a major English poet. He is recognized as one of the greatest
romantic poets in history. Percy Bysshe Shelley gained fame after his death. He is also the
husband of Mary Shelley, who is the author of Frankenstein. His most notable poems are
Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark, Music, When Soft Voices Die, The Cloud
and The Masque of Anarchy.

Percy Bysshe Shelley was born on August 4, 1972. He was born near Sussex. He was the
eldest son of Timothy Shelley and Elizabeth Pitford. He had four younger sisters and a
brother. Percy Bysshe Shelley attended Eton College. He was suffered mob torment at the
hands of older boys. This phenomenon almost took place on a daily basis. This was due to
his refusal to work as a servant to his seniors. Percy Bysshe Shelley was nicknamed Mad
Shelley. He enrolled in University College, Oxford. It is rumored that he only attended one
lecture.

His thought regarding the existence of God was very criticized, but he said that the generality
of the human race was ignorance. The need to name and understand hidden, distant and
unknown events, caused God to be named as responsible for what man was unable to
understand. Following Shelley, every time we say that God is the author of some
phenomenon, we are ignoring how such phenomenon was able to operate with the help of
forces or causes that we know in nature.

In this sense, man imputes to the Divinity not only the unusual effects that disturb them but
also the simple ones, whose causes we could understand if we study them. In short, man has
always respected the surprising effects that his ignorance did not allow him to unravel. From
this ignorance of nature by man was born the imaginary of the Divine. From 1811, Percy
Bysshe Shelley received a clear influence from William Godwin because he maintained an
epistolary and personal relationship for years; Godwin’s influence on Shelley’s poetry is
already noticeable in 1813, while he was part of the second generation of the circle of
romantic writers.
The influence of Godwin is expressed in the impulse of ethical rationalism, the establishment
of utopian proposals, the vindication of the passions and the principle of the primacy of
feelings. These four characteristics gave space to the theoretical foundation of English
romanticism, expressed in English literature. From this moment, English literature is given
greater relevance to morals and behavior, than to religion and traditions. From this point, it
is good to emphasize that Shelley considered the German romantic philosophy as
counterrevolutionary. Nevertheless, there was a point of concurrence between the romantic
movements, the German and the English, which was individualism; in poets such as Shelley,
specifically, it reflected overtly revolutionary tendencies.

The breakdown of Shelley’s friendship with Godwin occurred when he decided, unhappy in
his marriage, to marry Mary, the 16-year-old daughter of Godwin, with whom he spent a lot
of time while consulting in Godwin’s library. It was there that he fell in love with Mary. In
July 1814, Percy Bysshe Shelley decided to run away with the young Mary, leaving behind
his wife and two children. They were married in the presence of Mary’s stepsister, Clare
Marie Jane Clairmont; the three embarked towards Switzerland. Six weeks after the flight,
they returned to England to find Godwin offended and outraged. In short, he learned of the
suicide of Harriet, his ex-wife, and lost the guardianship of his two sons.

Mary did not go to school, she was educated at home and acquired an admirable knowledge
of the intellectual circle of her father. We can affirm that his presence was very enriching in
Shelley’s life. While she was married, she wrote the famous work of Frankenstein, a book
she wrote before she was twenty. Although, it is affirmed that her written production could
have been greater if her husband had not overshadowed Mary’s creativity. Despite this, she
is considered one of the great authors of the short story, a fertile genre in English literature.

Due to his condition: tuberculosis, he left in the company of Mary his country to settle in
Italy. He lived in Milan, Lucca, Venice, Naples, and Florence; places that took the
opportunity to write some of the works mentioned above. At that point, his works showed
melancholy before the misfortunes of existence. This great romantic poet died in a shipwreck,
in Lerici, Italy, on July 8, 1822.
MOVEMENT

Percy Bysshe Shelley is one of the great representatives of English romanticism and a writer
characterized by a radical free thought that can be called an anarchist, his extensive poetic
work is wrapped in an emotional humanism that makes it unique.
Shelley belongs to a second generation of romantic poets, along with Byron and Keats, whose
political ideal is already in the liberation of the peoples and in the revolution. If a first
generation, looked more at America in their aspirations and ended up in a kind of spiritual
retreat within nature, the second was more ambitious and they endeavored to orient
themselves towards the public, engage in the social and develop a mythology Alternative to
Christianity.
Romanticism is an artistic, literary and cultural movement that began in England and
Germany at the end of the 18th century, and spread to other countries in Europe and the
Americas during the first half of the 19th century. It marked a break with the ideology of the
Enlightenment, opposing the rational precepts and the new structure of society that was built
around the bourgeois.
Shelley's poetry sings the beauty and power of love, as well as her great attraction to nature.
Very often, he has a prophetic tone with which he wants to convey certain moral values, of
classical inspiration. At the same time, a considerable part of Shelley's production has a
political and social background and, as a thinker, poetry with a strong philosophical
component is not strange.
From the formal point of view, he is a master in the use of traditional poetic forms, which he
uses with exquisite harmony and, sometimes, with images and metaphors endowed with great
sensitivity.
Shelley "attributes" "the abuse that is made of any invention to reduce and combine work to
the exasperation of humanity's inequalities" to "a disproportionate cultivation of the
mechanical arts with respect to the presence of the creative faculty (imagination) which is
the basis of all knowledge”
Shelley's thinking produces perfect continuity between what a person believes that she and
the world should be (conscience), what she wants or wants to be and that happens (will) and
what actually is and happens (reality).
 Exaltation of the self: the romantics emphasized individualism and subjectivism.
From there an interest arose within the man and the mysteries of the subconscious.
 Melancholy and disappointment: There is an internal tear. The romantics rejected the
time they had to live, and lamented the injustice of the world and the transience of
life.
 Authenticity of emotions: the romantics believed that the human emotions that were
behind the artistic expressions should come afloat without predetermined parameters
 or molds to accommodate. These should come from the imagination of each artist and
without rules that dictate how to express them.
 Wild and hostile nature: Nature represented a space for spiritual experiences, and this
reflected the sadness and anguish of their dejected and disenchanted souls of reality.
In the same way there was a return for the taste of the rural and primitive in
comparison to the urban and developed, in addition to an exaltation to the own and
local versus the cosmopolitan and progressive trends.

ANALYSIS

Shelley wrote “Ozymandias” in 1817 as part of a poetry contest with a friend, and had it published
in The Examiner in 1818 and inspired by the discovery of a statue of Ramses the second

the Greek name for ramses ii was Ozymandias which means OZY which comes from the greek for
the word air and mandias which comes from the greek mandate which is a ruler so it's either a
ruler of air and always a ruler of everything including the air and breath itself.

Form
"Ozymandias" is a sonnet, and as is traditional for a sonnet the poem is made up of fourteen lines
of iambic pentameter. However, after fulfilling those two most basic rules of the sonnet,
"Ozymandias" then goes on to play with and break the form.

The poem does this in a few ways. First, it plays with rhyme scheme by generally, but completely,
following the scheme of a famous type of sonnet called a Shakespearean sonnet.

In addition, while the poem's rhyme scheme is mostly that of a Shakespearean sonnet, its structure
is more similar to that of another type of sonnet called a Petrarchan sonnet. More specifically, the
poem uses the Petrarchan structure of having an eight line octave followed by a six-line sestet:

Octave: Lines 1-8 of the poem focus on the statue

Sestet: Lines 9-14 of the poem focus on the pedestal and surroundings.

The poem, then, invokes two of the most prominent types of sonnet—Shakespearean and
Petrarchan—but then breaks both types by refusing to follow the full conventions of either one.
This "breaking" of the poetic conventions that it references can be read as an echo of the broken
work of art—the statue—that "Ozymandias" describes.

Rhyme Scheme
"Ozymandias" is a sonnet, and sonnets have strict rules about rhyme scheme. However, Shelley
deliberately broke those rules when writing the poem. More specifically, the poem largely follows
the rhyme scheme of a Shakespearean sonnet, which traditionally follows the pattern of
ABABCDCDEFEFGG: six sets alternating rhymes braided together, and then a rhyming couplet at the
end.

"Ozymandias" mostly follows this pattern, but introduces three important deviations:
An extra A rhyme inserted into line 5

An extra E rhyme inserted into line 9

No concluding couplet

The result is an entirely non-standard sonnet rhyme scheme of ABABACDCEDEFEF. Note also that
the poem plays with its rhymes in another way: a number of its rhymes are actually slant rhymes
(“stone” and “frown” in lines 2 and 4, "read" and "fed" in lines 6 and 8, and “appear” and “despair”
in lines 9 and 11).

These changes to the traditional rhyme scheme heighten the similarities between the poem and the
statue that it describes: both are works of art that appear to be broken and missing pieces, and both
still endure despite the passing of time.

“Ozymandias” Symbols
Sand
Sand is a symbol for nature’s power and also for time itself. The sand has eroded and buried the
statue and all of Ozymandias’s works, a reminder that nature can destroy all human achievements,
no matter how substantial. Because it also destroyed the statue over time, and because of the idea
of sand in an hourglass, sand is also a symbol for time, which has similarly worn down and eventually
buried Ozymandias's empire .

The Statue
The statue of Ozymandias has a few different symbolic meanings. First, it is a physical representation
of the might of human political institutions, such as Ozymandias’s empire — this is the symbolic
purpose for which Ozymandias himself had the statue built. However, because the statue has fallen
into disrepair, it also holds a symbolic meaning that Ozymandias didn't intend: how comparatively
fragile human political institutions actually are in the face of both time and nature’s might.

The statue also symbolizes the power of art.

Man Versus Nature

As a Romantic poet, Shelley was deeply respectful of nature and skeptical of humanity’s attempts
to dominate it. Fittingly, his “Ozymandias” is not simply a warning about the transience of political
power, but also an assertion of humanity’s impotence compared to the natural world. The statue
the poem describes has very likely become a “colossal Wreck” precisely because of the relentless
forces of sand and wind erosion in the desert. This combined with the fact that “lone and level
sands” have taken over everything that once surrounded the statue suggests nature as an
unstoppable force to which human beings are ultimately subservient.

Shelley’s imagery suggests a natural world whose might is far greater than that of humankind. The
statue is notably found in a desert, a landscape hostile towards life. That the statue is “trunkless”
suggests sandstorms eroded the torso or buried it entirely, while the face being “shattered” implies
humanity’s relative weakness: even the destruction of a hulking piece of stone is nothing for nature.
The fact that the remains of the statute are “half sunk” under the sand, meanwhile, evokes a kind
of burial. In fact, the statement “nothing beside remains” can be read as casting the fragments of
the statue as the “remains” of a corpse. The encroaching sand described in the poem suggests that
nature has steadily overtaken a once great civilizations and buried it, just as nature will one day
reclaim everything humanity has built, and every individual human as well.

The desert, not Ozymandias, is thus the most powerful tyrant in Shelley’s poem. It is “boundless”
and “stretch[es] far away” as though it has conquered everything the eye can see, just as it has
conquered Ozymandias’s statue. Ozymandias may be the king of kings, but even kings can be
toppled by mere grains of sand.