12, Being Shelley, by Ann Wroe, pp. 317-340

Part IV: Fire, 2. Burning

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Having his own ideas about God, Shelley naturally had corresponding ones about God's adversary. Even as a boy he liked to play Satan and to conduct experiments with chemicals and incantations to raise the devil, and he terrified Harriet with talk of "his supreme Majesty the Devil." She overcame her fears only to have them resurrected by an experience in February 1813. They were in Wales, where Shelley had gotten involved with an effort to reclaim land from the sea, a project that had stout opposition. One night, Shelley heard a noise downstairs and took his pistols with him when he went to investigate. A man, who was leaving through a window, fired a shot at him and missed. Shelley returned fire but the man escaped, vowing revenge. A few hours later, he heard another noise at the window and someone fired another shot at him, which narrowly missed. "Shelley fired his own pistol and grabbed an old sword to beat the stranger off but then, losing him, set fire to the nearby woods to burn him alive.... Most probably, local enemies had come to scare the nuisance-radical away. But to Shelley, at the instant he saw him, he was the Devil."

For Shelley, "Satan and God alike were projections of man's mind, nothing else. They were sappers of his will, crushers of his potential, but self-made.... If God was the callous monarch, the Devil was 'the Informer, the Attorney General, and the jailor of the Celestial tribunal.'" But Satan was also himself, "the bad daemon twinned with the good." He found his archetype in Paradise Lost: "Milton, Shelley wrote, 'alleged no superiority of moral virtue to his God over his Devil.' In fact, the Devil was 'far superior.'.... Shelley's closing cry to enslaved manking in his Declaration of Rights was Satan's, to his angels, from Paradise Lost: 'Awake! -- arise! -- or be forever fallen.'" If Milton's Satan could only overcome "hate, pride and his own belief, amounting sometimes to despair, in the tyrant-God who tormented him ... [he] could be divine, as Shelley could. Only an act of will was needed."

Shelley believed "that God in his infinite cruelty had devised unending tortures for his creatures while tempting them, in their frailty and ignorance, towards the sin that would condemn them. The gift of 'most merciful God' to man was an eternity of pain. By contrast Satan's gift, through the fatal apple, had been self-knowledge."

Shelley kept the churchmen's Hell to bait God with, not believing it, fearing it or caring. And he could find smaller hells aplenty strewn across the universe. In his essay On the Devil and Devils he had cynical fun with the argument that the sun might be a Hell, swarming with devils as unconcerned about boiling as the animalculae he had seen in mutton broth, and that the countless comets might be needed as little hells too for the overflow of "sinners" and the "damned." With the mind of a bigot, he could make eternal torture chambers even of the stars. 

With his polemic pamphlets, Shelley practiced a kind of pyromania: "His writings were meant to start destroying and purifying fires, the words searing individually into minds and hears and igniting, he hoped, a roaring chain reaction." Peacock caricatured him in Nightmare Abbey as Scythrop Glowry, "a burnt child" who was the author of Philosophical Gas; or, a Project for a General Illumination of the Human Mind. Shelley liked the caricature "but both the enlightenment and the pyrotechnics were seriously meant." He once asked a man in Hampstead to help him find shelter for a sick woman and when the man refused, proclaimed "that if ever a 'convulsion' came to England, which was 'very probable,' 'you will have your house ... burnt over your head!'"

He was, in fact, a good shot, having handled firearms since childhood: "he was often the best at Byron's shooting afternoons in the vineyards outside Pisa, squarely hitting the pumpkin or the five-paul piece stuck in a cane, even though, Byron said, 'he is thinking of metaphysics rather than of firing.'" But his real weapon was the pen, which "carried his imaginings, glowing and dangerous: again, the reed tipped with flame, or the hollow stem in which Prometheus, his hero, had stolen fire from the gods."

After that sly theft, Prometheus had founded all the human arts that were most precious to Shelley. Language and words; music and prophetic song; the art of building in columns to admit the air, and the science of navigation by the stars. Each talent forged by Prometheus was  touched by the leaping life of imagination, the fire he had stolen, approaching the divine.... In Aeschylus's fragment Prometheus Bound, from which Shelley developed his own "lyrical drama," Prometheus had been intended eventually to reach a pact with Jupiter. Shelley rejected "a catastrophe so feeble." His Prometheus would make no deals with tyrants. 

Shelley's attitude toward Jesus Christ was ambivalent. He "hated the 'Galilean serpent'; but he could stomach his name, even revere it, once the trappings of established Christianity had been stripped away. Christ as the Son of God, he had written in 1812, was 'a hypocritical Daemon,' Christ as a man, on the other hand, 'stands in the foremost list of those true heroes who have died in the glorious martyrdom of liberty.'" Shelley paired this Jesus "with Socrates, an outcast from the state."

His chief weapon was Love, which "was the law of life. Creation, motion, gravitation, magnetism, heat and electricity were all that force.... Love was infinite, unsatiated, ever divisible and inexhaustible; to share and divide it (as with Harriet, Mary, Claire, Emilia, Jane) was merely to increase it. In his new Promethean world, growing towards perfection, Love would be 'common as light,' and light itself." But he was also "not such an optimist, or a fool, to believe that this would last. Nothing on Earth lasted. History moved in inexorable cycles. ... Prometheus would become Jupiter again." 
 

7. Being Shelley, by Ann Wroe, pp. 182-210

Part II: Water, 3. Escape from "Many of his Poet-journeys were inward..." through end. Part III: Air, 1. The shadow through "... a radiant light rests on men, and life is sweet."

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Shelley made several journeys attempting to trace the source of streams and lakes, a quest that resembled his inward one:  "At some point thought, like water, disappeared underground, enticing him into the dark." He was fascinated with mazes, drawing them in his notebooks and exploring the maze-like ruins of the Baths of Caracalla, where he wrote Prometheus Unbound. His walks in woods and cities would often end up with him getting lost.

He loved to build boats, both toy ones and real, and in 1822 he designed a sailboat to explore the Bay of Spezia. As a joke, Byron, whose own boat was built in the same yard, had "the name Don Juan painted in large black letters on the mainsail." The attempts to wash the letters out left the sail dingy, and it had to be replaced so the boat could be the pure white Shelley wanted. It was refitted as well, becoming "swifter, slimmer and less stable.... Most remarkable and foolish was a gaff topsail, providing more surface to the wind than unskilled sailors could possibly manage. But that was the point of her."

Shelley was a careless sailor, too preoccupied with his thoughts and the books and notebooks he brought on board with him. "He took exercise in boats, he told Claire, 'to dissipate thought,' or in other words to stop time weighing on him." And he thought of boats as a means to escape from persecutors, such as the Lord Chancellor who had taken away his children by Harriet. He took his children out on boats even when they were small: "the sole memory his son Percy, who was two when [Shelley] died, preserved of him [was of] strong, cradling arms lifting him on board." He imagined his boats as birds: "Among his very last drafts of poetry Shelley drew a page of sleek prows, giving them wings."

In 1823 a Geneva boatman gave his views on Shelley. He remembered him stretched on the bottom of the boat "gazing at Heaven, where he would never enter." Mary had a similar memory of Shelley observing skies and clouds as he drifted on the river at Marlow. He floated in a light cocoon between the water and the air. Often the two were interchangeable. The sea was "Heaven's ever-changing shadow," the sky "the inverse deep," each mirroring the other. The air was eddying and liquid; birds dived in it, as fish in the sea; clouds became sunrise-tinted foam, and waves broke in shiverings of mist and light. Though Shelley could not cope in water, in air he imagined he could move like a swimmer, his "subtle spirit" gliding and turning in an element that could carry him.

He was fascinated by clouds, and particularly by their relationship to the earth: "They clung like thought itself to the tops of the woods, or trailed on the flanks of mountains." He was amazed to find the peaks of the Alps rising above the clouds: "his mountain summits were always 'aery,' 'aëreal,' 'floating' or 'íslanded' in the deep sea of the sky." He was intrigued by Humphry Davy's writings about the atom, which "pictured transparent atoms in tiny revolutions about their own axes and about each other, copying the motions of the universe. They were mostly empty, letting movement in." He echoed this in Prometheus Unbound, and thought of his body as "the model of the moving universe; his substance, which seemed so solid, was as porous and open to influence the wide pulsating air."

He also thought of himself, the Poet, as a chameleon, taking on the colors of his surroundings. "His chameleon nature also sensitised him to the least sign of good or evil in the world. Friends saw that sensitivity in Shelley's own change of colour, from the pallor of his 'languid' days to the furious blushing when he was forced to be sociable or was caught out in lying." The chameleon Shelley was manifested in his personality. Sometimes he took on the manner of "Socrates, his hero, ... careless of clothes and shoes, happy on a diet of bread and vegetables, and, most of all, suddenly losing himself, so wrapped in thought that he took no stock of where he was." He was was undependable:

Summoned to appointments, he did not come. Called to dinner, he was out in the woods or by water, writing. He told Trelawny, rather sharply, that the Muses who lived in the air did not dine. Bird-like, he picked at any food he found -- wild strawberries, "milky" pine-nuts shaken in the grass -- and winged his way back with the birds as evening fell.

He was notoriously difficult to capture in portraits, though many of his friends tried. "All these friends presumed him uncatchable because he was not of the earth." Some of them, "only half joking, presumed Shelley could fly." They compared him to Oberon or Puck from A Midsummer Night's Dream, or to aliens from outer space. "Keats -- who encountered him at Hunt's in Hampstead, but foudn him too overbearing -- once remarked, with slight jealousy, that Shelley probably never sat with his wings furled for six months together."

3. Being Shelley, by Ann Wroe, pp. 57-93

Part I: Earth, 2. Chains from "On the heights of Bisham Wood ... " to end; 3. Masks through "... Sick to death of the name of self / Killing / Self."

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Shelley was fascinated with the then-new science of geology, and filled his notes with drawings of geological formations, images of the antiquity of the Earth. As a student of the classics, "he mourned ... the disappearance of the Athenian democracy. He never saw Greece but observed, in 1818 in Pompeii, the ruins of what he stressed had been a Greek city." The geological record and the ruins of ancient civilizations reminded him that "Everything on the Earth became the Earth" and that "All kings became nothing," sentiments articulated in the sonnet "Ozymandias" which was "written in an hour or so in 1817."

In France in 1814 he came across a village devastated by the war that he denounced as "liberticide" that had been "unleashed against the French to reverse their revolution." As an Englishman he was upset when his own government "joined forces in 1815 with 'the seven bloodhounds' ... -- Austria, Bourbon France, Portugal, Prussia, Russia, Spain and Sweden -- to suppress reform in Europe and to preserve the slave trade." He believed that Earth itself "breathed and lived and cried out at injustice.... In Shelley's view, great traumas -- none greater than the French Revolution, descending to the Terror, then to Napoleon's imperium, then in 1815 to the Bourbon restoration -- had their birth in physical upheaval as much as in the minds of men." He did not see human progress as a steady forward movement: "Earthly existence meant continual frustration. Centuries and generations might pass while the cycles of human progress edged forward, then regressed, as they had done in France."

He was not a child of the French Revolution so much as of its awful aftermath, when the rule of the people had descended to an orgy of reprisals and blood. He was deeply disappointed by this "sanguine eagerness," but not surprised: men suddenly released from the slavery that had made them "brutal and torpid and ferocious" could not immediately be "liberal-minded" and "forbearing." He refused to despair, as so many did; the pessimistic weariness of the revolutionary generation, Wordsworth, Coleridge, South and the rest, angered and disgusted him. Shelley insisted on hope as a matter of principle. Yet it was qualified by the fear that the people, once given power, would take revenge, bringing more horrors.

"Hope" may have kept him going, but he also entertained thoughts of suicide, especially after those of Harriet and Fanny Godwin, Mary's half-sister, who killed herself in October 1816, age twenty-two. Fanny had taken an overdose of laudanum, a drug with which Shelley was familiar since his days at Eton and to which he became addicted. In 1818, he and Mary suffered the loss of their daughter, Clara, at eighteen months, from typhoid fever. William, three and a half, died from worms and malaria the next summer. "Mary was devastated by the deaths of her children. Shelley's far quicker recovery deepened the estrangement between them. Yet the horror, for him, was not death. True horror was to be condemned, like the Wandering Jew, to eternal earthly life, forever dragging that worthless body, never able to rest."

His poems are full of flowers, symbols of "beauty and mortality combined," and his friends took them as emblems of Shelley himself. "Hogg saw him as 'a climber, a creeper, an elegant, beautiful, odoriferous parasitical plan' that needed tying to a from stick, such as himself." Plants and flowers also provided him an image of sexual love: "Trees interlaced, tendrils wound about each other, petals opened to the touch of the sun and their perfume fled away." And for the destructive side of passion as well: "He pictured it in his poems as bitter-sweet nightshade, bright-berried but deadly, or poisonous white bryony garlanding a cave for erotic and tormented dreams." Though he admitted, in Discourse on the Manners of the Ancient Greeks, "delicately and offhandedly, to routine masturbation" and drew a detailed picture of his erect penis on a page on which he had made some calculations, he sometimes expressed a disgust with the mechanisms of sex. The madman who is one of his personae in Julian and Maddalo wishes "That, like some maniac monk, I had torn out / The nerves of manhood by their bleeding root / With mine own quivering fingers."

The flowers he singled out as his personal images were pansies and Mimosa pudica. The latter provided a symbol for himself in "The Sensitive Plant." It was "hermaphrodite, with male and female flowers sharing a stem and feathery leaves that folded at a shadow, or a touch. Shelley-like, it grew alone. It was almost constantly aroused, quivering with desire 'from the leaf to the root,' yet could never find love to match the love it felt." As for pansies, he wanted them on his grave, which was to have no tombstone with his name on it -- a name that he allowed to be printed on "only eight of his 14 poetical publications." He said of his "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" that "it deserves a better fate than the being linked with so stigmatised & unpopular a name ... as mine." He also "obscured when poems were written" and even his letters were sent out under various names. Sometimes this was to prevent prosecution for blasphemy, but others, such as the ones he wrote to Claire Clairmont, were to avoid arousing Mary's suspicions. Some of them dealt with a baby, Elena Adelaide Shelley, whose mother may have been either Claire or the Shelleys' maid, Elise. He paid for Elena's care for the few months of her life.

He also had nicknames: "Byron called him Shiloh, after the seraph-man a crazed prophetess, Joanna Southcott, believed she would give birth to. Hunt and Peacock called him "the Conchoid," which was a shy, spiky creature that disappeared into its shell. At school he had been "Don Quixote" because of "his tendency ... to catapult himself into fights." And Emilia Viviani, when she heard his name was Percy, thought it was Persi, meaning "lost," which he liked.

Like the Poet in Alastor, he craved solitude, or at least a minimum of company. "Two women and himself, loosening the monopoly of 'the society of one' (no matter what the cost in jealousy and unhappiness) was his ideal all through his life." But he also abhorred selfishness.

Self-interest was the essence of the world he moved in. Shelley traced to it every child crying with hunger, every wasted labourer, the pollution of cities, the filthy opulence of monarchs, war and desolation.... Self-interest made men acquiesce in tyranny, bringing their evils wilfully upon themselves, enthroning both 'the oppression and the oppressor.'" 

On the other hand, self-esteem, gained through self-knowledge, was, along with Love and Hope, one of his three cardinal virtues. Empathy was also a virtue:

Shelley's own Poet's life put him deeply, or so it seemed, in the selves and the miseries of others. He ached with the aged, crippled woman gathering firewood to supplement parish charity; he throbbed with the pride of a freedom fighter, wrapped in his gore-soaked flag, dying on the field in Mexico.

But he also expected the same imaginative sympathy to be extended to himself: "If he extended his human sympathy to others he desperately and urgently wanted it returned, especially by the women with whom he had chosen to live." And he was as susceptible to egotism as anyone.

He was glad, he told a friend in 1821, that he had not known the details of Keats's death when he composed Adonais for him, or 'the enthusiasm of the imagination would have been overpowered by sentiment.' As it was, the dead poet, pale and beautiful as a 'broken lily,' tears trembling 'on the silken fringe of his faint eyes,' was also Shelley in death, heartbreakingly sentimentalized.

2. Being Shelley, by Ann Wroe, pp. 37-56

Part I: Earth, 2. Chains through "... The which I make & call it melody"

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Shelley's tour of the dungeons of the Castle of Chillon in 1816 reinforced a fascination with prisons as a manifestation of the restrictions placed on liberty. He regarded the schools he had attended as prisons, and had once been imprisoned himself, for debt, in 1817.

In his view slavery pervaded life, even the otiose and disgusting lives of emperors, priests and kings. He drew them on iron thrones, weighed under iron sceptres, heavily dragging their carcasses to east and shackled to the very systems they imposed on others. Under them, the people groaned.... If man was a slave, woman was his "bond-slave." Shelley saw young women downtrodden and dishonoured by convention -- models of his favourite heroine, Antigone, destroyed by her love and pity by the Theban laws -- while young men like himself were forced to visit prostitutes by "monkish" rules of chastity that spread disease and repair. 

Children, in Shelley's view, had it worst, "restrained by parental discipline, church, school, and worse" -- the horror of child labor. It led him in August 1811 to "rescue" Harriet Westbrook from the school she attended in Clapham. She was sixteen and he was nineteen, and he really didn't want to marry her -- "Matrimony revolted him" as another form of bondage. But he did so on August 29, 1811, in Edinburgh. He made his attempts to educate her, teaching her Latin and converting her to vegetarianism. "Yet her mind was in fetters of another kind, bound by propriety, seemliness and fashion as tightly as ribbons on a bonnet, and Shelley could neither change her nor, in the end, save her." Her older sister, Eliza, moved in with them in October, bringing "censoriousness and rectitude, scolding and 'nerves,' while endlessly brushing her long black hair." Shelley, the believer in free love, "was now confined, numb, tranquillised."

Their daughter, Ianthe, was born in 1813, and they renewed their vows in 1814, just in case the marriage in Scotland was judged illegal. But that summer he met Mary Godwin, who was sixteen and "imbued with the feminist free-thinking of her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, who had died just after she was born." They had sex "in St Pancras churchyard, by her mother's grave," in June 1814 and a month later fled to Scotland, leaving Harriet, who was four months pregnant. He wrote Harriet preachy letters about how she had failed to follow the path to freedom he had shown her. "In curt postscripts, he asked her to send him 'hanks' and stockings and to lend him money." Harriet committed suicide in December 1816, and "he was forced by custom and the Godwins" to marry Mary on December 30.

Mary had "been a kindred soul" and had perhaps even slept with his friend Hogg with his encouragement, but she "became a fretting and domesticated wife," jealous of Claire Clairmont, her step-half-sister -- christened Jane -- who had joined them when they eloped. The high-strung Claire also got on Mary's nerves. Mary gave birth to William in 1816 and Clara in 1817, but the move to Italy in 1818 proved fatal to the children, both of whom died in the summer of 1819. That November a third child, Percy Florence, was born, but the Shelleys had fallen out of love with each other. "When he could he escaped with Claire, who would love him -- perhaps physically, perhaps not -- but would not, in any case, possess him.

In 1820, he became acquainted with Teresa Emilia Viviani, nineteen, who was boarding in a convent in Pisa while waiting to be married. Shelley saw her as another prisoner and wrote poems to her, but Emilia chose to get married once the contract was arranged and "to live contentedly and soberly with her 'clod of earth.'" Like so many others, however, Emilia asked him for money. "For most of his life Shelley had enough, either in anticipation or reality, to be 'the purse of his friends,' including [Leigh] Hunt, Thomas Love Peacock and Claire." His father-in-law, William Godwin, also "made it clear that it was Shelley's duty to bail him out.... By August 1819 he reckoned he had given Godwin £4,700, and had 'bought bitter knowledge' with it. That begging was to continue, and worsen, for the remaining three years of Shelley's life."

Shelley's father had cut off his allowance for a few months when he eloped with Harriet, so Shelley knew what it was like to need money. But it didn't teach him to handle it wisely. "His private income -- eventually settled as an annuity of £1,000 when, in 1815, his grandfather's death freed up his funds -- removed him fom the sordidness of earning a living." But when he had money he spent it or gave it away, and he borrowed at "such colossal rates of interest that by March 1822, four months before his death, he reckoned his debts might amount to £25,000."

His wanderings were expensive, too. "To tie him to any particular landscape, as Wordsworth was tethered to his lakes and fells, was hopeless.... [H]e moved incessantly." In 1811, when he left Oxford, he went to London, York, Edinburgh, Keswick and Dublin. Then to Wales, Devon, Wales again, Ireland again, London again, Berkeshire, London again, Bishopsgate and Marlow. He and Mary and Claire wandered in France and Germany in the summer of 1814; "in July 1816 he was with Mary, Claire and Byron in Switzerland; in March 1818 he left England for definitive exile in Italy. Yet there too he moved constantly, from Milan to Pisa, to Leghorn, to Bagni de Lucca, to Venice, to Rome (by 1819), to Naples, to Pisa, to Villa Magni at San Terenzo, near Lerici." Some of these moves seem to have been inspired by paranoia: "Many wanderings were blamed on government spies, creditors, his father's agents (his father, he was sure, ever seeking a pretext to imprison him), and men of vague but broad menace against him, some real, some imaginary."

And some of the restlessness came from a fear of being imprisoned by ties to a place.

If he were to settle anywhere he would sink into time, and the hours would close round him. Too dull and comfortable to struggle, he would not escape.... Time inhabited his poems as a figure wrapped in shroud-like wings, driving a chariot slowly forward. Shelley could neither push the chariot faster (though he sometimes longed to whip it till the wheels burned), nor get out of its way. Time weighed him down and tormented him. He longed to be suspended, unthinking and therefore unaware of the slow hours passing, in some spell of inspiration, or in the unknowable state that followed death.... If Shelley were to say, with Faust, to the passing moment, Verweile doch, du bist [so] schön! "Remain thou, thou art so beautiful!", he was consigning himself to death in life, as surely as if he were to live for ever within the same four walls. 

1. Being Shelley, by Ann Wroe, pp. ix-34

Introduction; Prelude: The Voyage Out; Part I: Earth, 1. Substance

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Ann Wroe says her book is "an experiment, ... an attempt to write the life of a poet from the inside out: that is, from the perspective of the creative spirit struggling to discover its true nature." She wants to "reconstruct the world of a poet into which earthly life keeps intruding," because she regrets that, in the twentieth century, so much attention was directed at Shelley's politics that "his spiritual force seems to have been largely forgotten." The narrative of the book is not chronological but instead tracks "the poet's quest for truth through the steadily rarefying elements of earth, water, air and fire." And if the book shifts the focus away from the life to the ideas, so be it. Shelley believed, "No revolution in the moral and social order could take place until he, and all men and women, knew themselves for what they were and could unlock the true power they possessed."

Wroe's "Prelude: the voyage out" is an impressionist series of vignettes in which the poet launches his words onto the sea in paper boats on which the ink begins to "blur and run." Each is "a shell of woven paper" moving "intrepidly and madly on the sea." "To the casual eye he was on shore, a tall, stooped young man with tangled hair and yet more boats in his pockets.... Yet in reality he was out on the huge sea adventuring, one of them." Inevitably the boats sink, foreshadowing the poet's own death: "His body would go on falling through the blue deep, softly, like paper. He had once told a small boy, watching with him, that this would be his favourite of all deaths."

Charles MacFarlane remembered his first encounter with Shelley in the Royal Bourbon Museum in Naples in February 1819. The stranger, who joined him in admiring a statue, had a "soft and strangely touching" voice and "was a gentleman of twenty-five or twenty-six, thin, with a delicate and negligent, even wild, appearance." Their conversation left MacFarlane with "fragments of deep thought, like leaves from a private notebook."

Percy Bysshe Shelley was born at Field Place, Horsham, Sussex, in 1792. His father was Timothy Shelley, a landowner who would become a baronet in 1815. Bysshe, as his family called him, was the oldest child, and would be joined by four sisters and, 14 years later, a brother. He attended Syon House Academy and Eton, but was expelled from Oxford after one term, in 1811, for writing, along with Thomas Jefferson Hogg, "a pamphlet entitled The Necessity of Atheism." In August he eloped with 16-year-old Harriet Westbrook, and after that marriage failed in 1814 with Mary Godwin, the daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. Mary's step-half-sister, Jane Clairmont, who would later be called Claire, went with them France and Germany and set up house with them after they returned to England. His father cut off ties with him, and in 1817, the Lord Chancellor "deprived him, on the double grounds of immorality and atheism, of the two infant children of his first marriage. He left England for Italy in March 1818.

Shelley told many stories about his childhood, but Hogg observed, "He was altogether incapable of rendering an account of any transaction whatsoever, according to the strict and precise truth, and the bare naked realities of actual life." Sometimes he thought of himself as a farmer, which is what he entered as his occupation on the register when he married Harriet. He was interested in agricultural chemistry and his poetic imagery often reflects his rural background. He inspected things so closely that people thought he was near-sighted, but "Shelley himself sometimes complained not of dim vision but the reverse."

One of his most treasured possessions, from boyhood onwards, was a solar microscope in a heavy mahogany box that projected, on a sheet or a wall, giant images of the animalculae that wriggled in vinegar, or the overlapping plates of a fly's wing, or the mites entombed in cheese.... He believed with Erasmus Darwin, whose books on science and Nature he also devoured as a schoolboy, that the minute worlds he saw suffered and felt as he did.... From his earliest years of scientific enquiry Shelley pictured Nature as one concurring whole, with an iron chain of Necessity binding the smallest to the mightiest.

Following the logic of Hume, he rejected the notion of "a designer and a cause," setting forth his ideas in The Necessity of Atheism. For him, "Unending mutability was the nature of existence.... Chance atoms came together: Shelley lived. He would die when by some stroke they dispersed again."

For all his ties to the land, "Earth was not his element, either in its substance or its society." He simply didn't like getting dirty: "At Eton he roared with pain when leather footballs, caked and soaked from the field, were kicked deliberately and hard against the boy who would not play games.... 'Filth' was almost the strongest word in his lexicon, a spasm of horror." But for all his finickiness, he was a fighter:

Contemporaries remembered ... a prankster and a brawler, a tall, slovenly looking boy (though also like 'a girl in Boy's clothes') who flailed around with his fists and was fearsomely violent when thwarted. Yet in his mind he was the quiet, trembling youth at the edge of the playing field.

At some point, he seems to have had an epiphany of sorts, a "sudden awakening, on one particular morning, to the shadow of the Spirit of Beauty in the world.... Several of his poems described the moment of conversion, but enclosed it in details too vague to pinpoint where or when it had occurred." In any case, it seems to have confirmed him in his radicalism.

His relationship with his parents was one manifestation of this radicalism. "He nursed no strong feelings for his mother, whom he thought mildly ineffectual and 'narrow-minded.' Towards his father he came to feel nothing but loathing and defiance." His father was shocked by everything he did, but especially when in April 1811, he decided "to give up the entail on his grandfather's estate, exchanging a secure landed inheritance for £200 yearly in cash." Even the annuity was cut off in August, when he eloped with Harriet Westbrook. For Shelley, his father symbolized tyranny. Shelley believed that his father, whom he referred to as "Old Buck" "had never loved him, but only the continuation of a name, property and status he represented, like a house or a field."

But though the break with his father left him destitute, Shelley never gave up his taste for luxury. At Oxford he "wore extraordinary clothes," and after he was expelled he boasted that he could live on £50 a year. But by 1817 he was in debt to the most fashionable upholsterers in Bath for £1,192 1s. 10d. He skipped out on the debt when he left for Italy. "For most of his life he kept horses and a carriage," but by 1819 he had decided that

It was the duty of the rich man to give and the right of the poor man to demand. On that principle, Shelley gave away his shoes (arriving at a neighbour's barefoot), his money, and Mary's clothes, continuing to hand out spontaneous charity until the last weeks of his life. On the same principle he took other men's books, and raided [Leigh] Hunt's wardrobe for waistcoats and handkerchiefs he might need himself. To take as well as give -- though sometimes blushing "not a little," Hunt said, in doing it -- was proper redistributive justice. 

But he also looked down on the poor: "most men, he was convinced, lived in a state of 'squalid ignorance, & moral imbecility' from which he foresaw no improvement." And he felt a contempt for the physical: "The link between political oppression, moral evil and physical degradation was all too obvious to him. The common folk of Dublin were 'one mass of animated filth,' the Austrian-occupied Italians 'stupid & shrivelled slaves.'" He thought that human corruption was the result not of "original sin" but of education, of "the 'wrong impressions' stamped on the young by nurses and parents and, if they grew older, by the barbarity of schools and systems of government."

Shelley himself was "tall, vigorous and strong-limbed.... In his notebooks he drew himself naked and muscle-bound, often with weapons in his hands." But the Poet thought of himself as frail and sickly, as susceptible to "'the contagion of the world's slow stain,' so easily fatal to poets, the sort of languors and vapours and excessive sensibilities that made young men throw themselves into chairs with their handkerchiefs pressed to their faces." He suffered from what may have been kidney stones and his hair had premature gray touches, "a syphilitic symptom that filled him with foreboding."


For a while he seemed to live on bread and milk and tea, but with occasional indulgences in gluttony. "From at least the age of nineteen, he was a practising vegetarian" and when he wanted to evoke a sense of horror "he described the eating of flesh, usually human, dwelling on its warm fibrous feel between his teeth and the rust or salt 'bitterness' of blood." He drank mostly water -- alcohol overstimulated him. "Yet his resolution wavered. He was found demolishing bacon ('Bring more bacon!') and feasting on veal chops, well peppered. Cold meat was discovered on his luncheon plate in Italy.... In general, however, the diet and the scruples were observed." Byron worried that if the Shelleys were to raise his daughter Allegra, "she would 'perish of Starvation, and green fruit.'"


He was thought to be mad by a lot of people, including sometimes himself. "This madness was always of the same kind: seeing what others could not see, yearning for what others could not fathom, not belonging." In Julian and Maddalo, "He was both the serious, idealistic Julian ... and a Maniac in a madhouse."

Each Shelley-character held a memory -- disturbed, but not eclipsed, even by stark grief -- of a blissful, momentary, controlling presence both within and beyond himself. This was what had made him mad.... Under its influence, Shelley had made his boyhood vow -- stumblingly, but devotedly -- to Truth, Beauty, Liberty and Love.... He did not know to whom, or what, he made this promise. For years he could not even try to name what it was that had so moved him. But his search for it became his history, and his life.