Percy Bysshe Shelley

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Percy Bysshe Shelley, painting by Amelia Curran , 1819.

Shelley's signature:
Percy Bysshe Shelley signature.jpg
Percy Bysshe Shelley, watercolor by unknown artist
Richard Rothwell : Mary Shelley, oil on canvas, 1840

Percy Bysshe Shelley [ ˈpɜːsi bɪʃ ˈʃɛli ] (born August 4, 1792 in Field Place, Sussex , † July 8, 1822 in the sea near Viareggio in the Italian region of Tuscany ) was a British writer of English Romanticism . He was an advocate of atheism .

Life

Percy Bysshe Shelley was the eldest son and apparent heir of the rich noble Sir Timothy Shelley, 2nd Baronet of Castle Goring (1753-1844). After early school education at Syon House Academy in Islington near London, he attended Eton College and Oxford University. As a student at Eton, he wrote in 1810 a Gothic novel entitled Zastrozzi, a romance and, along with his sister Elizabeth, Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire . While still in Oxford, he made friends with Thomas Jefferson Hogg , who remained close to him until his death and was probably also close to Shelley's wives. Together with Hogg he wrote the pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism (C. & W. Phillips, Worthing 1811) in 1811, essentially a summary of the arguments of John Locke and David Hume , and was shared with Hogg because of his rebellious attitude towards the college administration of the Referred to colleges at Oxford.

In 2006 Shelley's Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things was rediscovered, which was also published anonymously in 1811, like The Necessity of Atheism , and which was directed against war and imperialism. This poem in four parts of 36, 52, 56 or 28 verses (iambic five-key in pair rhyme) with a foreword ( Preface ) and notes ( Notes to Essay, etc. ) may have contributed to its exclusion from Oxford. On a formal procedural level, Shelley's expulsion from Oxford was due to his refusal to answer certain questions, namely authorship.

In 1811 he married Harriet Westbrook, then 16, in Scotland . That led to a falling out with his father.

In 1813 Shelley's poem Queen Mab was published; A Philosophical Poem; With Notes , which is characterized by revolutionary content and which chooses as its main target of attack established religion, political tyranny, the destructive forces of war and trade, and the perversion of human love by the limitations of marriage.

At the same time, Shelley advocated a vegetarian lifestyle. References to this can be found in the poem Queen Mab . So he writes there: “And man, (...) stands / immortal on earth; no longer / he slays the lamb that looks him in the face / and devours his torn flesh in a terrible way, "(" And man, (...), stands / Immortal upon earth; no longer now / He slays the lamb that looks him in the face, / And horribly devours his mangled flesh, ”).

In 1813 he commented on this in detail in his book A Vindication of Natural Diet ("A defense of natural nutrition"). The entire essay originally appeared as a "Note" to Queen Mab , and was published separately after the poem was published.

In June 1814 he met Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin , daughter of the suffragette Mary Wollstonecraft and the philosopher William Godwin and later author of the famous novel Frankenstein . William Godwin did not approve of the relationship. Shelley, Mary Godwin and their stepsister Claire Clairmont then left England in July 1814 and traveled to France and Switzerland. In September 1814 they returned to London.

In May 1816 Shelley traveled to Geneva with Mary Godwin, their young son William and Claire Clairmont to meet Lord Byron . Byron lived together with his personal physician, John William Polidori , the Villa Diodati ; Shelley, Mary, William and Claire moved into a chalet nearby.

In June there was a special event when, in the evening, in conversations about eerie topics such as somnambulism or galvanism, the idea arose that everyone present should write a horror story. This was the origin of Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus and of John Polidori's story The Vampyre .

That summer Shelley et al. a. the poems Hymn to Intellectual Beauty and Mont Blanc . At Montblanc was inspired Shelley during a tour in the Chamonix valley. Shelley's Mont Blanc does not follow the tradition of glorifying alpine poems, but also has the threat posed by the mountain in mind. He sees this mountain in a way that pushes the boundaries. Shelley creates a fusion between observer and object.

In September 1816 Shelley, Mary, William and Claire returned to England to settle in Bath.

At the beginning of December 1816, Harriet committed suicide; and a short time later Mary Godwin and Shelley married. A little later, their second child, a girl, was born while Claire gave birth to a daughter of Byron. By inheriting a lifelong annuity of £ 1,000, Shelley saw his livelihood secured; it bothered him, however, that he did not receive custody of his two children from his marriage to Harriet. Regardless, he was artistically extremely productive in the last year of his life in England.

He moved to Switzerland on Lake Geneva with his 19-year-old wife . He pursued further radical political positions in his writings, including for the equality of Irish Catholics and against the union with England.

The family lived in Italy since 1818. There the Shelleys met again and again with Lord Byron in Este , whose illegitimate daughter Allegra and her mother Claire Clairmont lived in the Shelleys household. Stays in Venice, Rome and Pisa followed, during which Shelley always kept a critical eye on the socio-economic circumstances of early industrial England and the associated political unrest: in 1819, for example, there was a bloody uprising by workers in the cotton processing industry in Manchester Suppression of the protest movement, which caused a sensation as the Peterloo massacre . Shelley then wrote the politically radical poem The Mask of Anarchy, directly referring to the incident . A Poem (only printed posthumously, Edward Moxon, London 1832).

Shelley's tombstone
Trelawny, Hunt and Byron burn Shelley's body, painting by Louis Édouard Fournier , 1889

Other related political poems followed: Lines Written during the Castlereagh Administration ; Song to the Men of England ; England in 1819 .

In July 1820, Shelley invited the poet John Keats to Pisa, Italy, after hearing of Keats's deteriorating health. Keats had tuberculosis. Shelley specifically wrote that he and his wife Mary would like to see him there. Shelley had met Keats in December 1816 at Leigh Hunt . Hunt was the editor of the radical magazine "The Examiner" and had a. a. the "Young Poets" Shelley, Keats and John Reynolds presented to the public.

In October 1820, Shelley received Keats' new volume of poetry, Lamia, Isabella, the Eve of St Agnes, and Other Poems Shelley was very impressed, even if he did not like all of the poems. Outstanding for Shelley was the "fragment" Hyperion , and he wrote about Keats in a letter to Marianne Hunt that he thought Keats was destined to become one of the "first writers of the age". He then asked, “Where is Keats now? I am eagerly awaiting him in Italy, where I will send him every possible concern. "

At the same time, Keats was still in quarantine on a ship in the port of Naples. He reached Rome on November 15th, 1820, and was already in very poor health. (His apartment at the time was later converted into a museum, the Keats-Shelley House .) About three months later, on February 23, 1821, Keats died in Rome without attempting to contact Shelley. Shelley did not find out about Keats 'death until April 15, when he returned from Livorno to Pisa, and also attributed Keats' death to the "contemptuous attacks" by literary critics that Keats had received. Byron, however, was rather skeptical of Shelley's view.

In early June 1821 Shelley began work on an elegy on John Keats, entitled Adonais. To Elegy on the Death of John Keats, Author of Endymion, Hyperion, etc. , and he finished the poem on June 11th. He then wrote a foreword in which he specifically spoke out against Keats' malicious critics, whom he made responsible for Keats's death. Also in the foreword he praised Joseph Severn , Keats' friend, who had accompanied Keats to Italy, for his self-sacrificing help and assistance. Shelley had planned the poem from the start as both an elegy and a polemic directed against the critics. According to Schmid's interpretation, Shelley Keats built up this poem into an "archetype (...) of the persecuted sufferer, for whom it was fatal that he spoke the truth"; however, the poet is not dead, “but has passed into a higher form of existence.” The poem says: “Peace, peace! He is not dead, he does not sleep - / He has awakened from the dream of life - "(" Peace, peace! He is not dead, he doth not sleep - / He hath awakened from the dream of life - ").

In 1821 Shelley wrote A Defense of Poetry , a text in which he set out his conception of poetry and his idea of ​​the role and function of the poet. There he describes the poets as persons who, in his understanding, are both “lawgivers” and “prophets”. The script ends with the following sentences: “Poets are the hierophants of an incomprehensible inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows that the future casts on the present; (...) The poets are the unrecognized legislators of the world. "(" Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; (...) Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world . ”)

In April 1822 Shelley moved into the "Villa Magni" in San Terenzo on the bay of La Spezia . Byron visited him there in the summer of 1822. Shelley had planned a new periodical with him and Leigh Hunt, which was to be called The Liberal , but it could no longer be realized. About a year after Shelley's writer friend John Keats died of tuberculosis, Shelley was killed in July 1822 while sailing on the coast near La Spezia near Viareggio with Edward Ellerker Williams and a friend named Daniel Roberts and a young boatman from Cornwall . The friends had set out on the excursion on July 8, but a storm had risen that afternoon. Fischer found his body four days later. The boat had capsized and Shelley, unable to swim, drowned. His artist friends Lord Byron, Edward John Trelawny and James Henry Leigh Hunt burned the body on a pyre by the sea. Shelley's ashes were buried in the Protestant cemetery in Rome. The inscription on his grave reads: COR. CORDIUM - heart of hearts .

reception

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Shelley's influence on Karl Marx and Walter Benjamin should be mentioned (see discussion )
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Shelley's poems were mostly rejected by contemporaries because of their remote subjects and unconventional views. However, critics also grant them a special beauty of language and poetic expression in wide passages. In addition to his own poetry Shelley translations of works has Calderon and Goethe's Faust I left. It was not until 1839 that the first reliable complete edition of his works appeared, which Mary Shelley published.

The famous poem Mont Blanc , composed on 22./23. June 1816, was published in History of a Six Week Tour (1817). Hymn to Intellectual Beauty appeared in Leigh Hunt's Examiner on January 19, 1817 , followed by a second version in Rosalind and Helen in 1819 .

Shelley also wrote explicitly socially critical political poetry, such as The Mask of Anarchy in response to the Peterloo massacre in Manchester in 1819 and the Sonnet England in 1819 . He sent The Mask of Anarchy to England, but a publication was not possible due to the political situation at the time.

His writings did not remain politically ineffective, for example they had an influence on the Chartists . Eleanor Marx , the youngest daughter of Karl Marx , emphasized Shelley's importance for the labor movement with the words: “I have heard my father and Engels talk about it again and again, and I have heard the same thing from the many Chartists whom I fortunately become Child was allowed to get to know. "

Shelley's poem Queen Mab; A Philosophical Poem; With Notes was one of the poems that met with great approval among political reformers and Chartists. Holmes considers it to be Shelley's most influential poem of the period. In 1848 Friedrich Engels began translating it into German, which he did not finish. The "Notes" contain six, basically independent essays.

Queen Mab also had an influence on a politically understood vegetarianism : In the Notes on Queen Mab he justified his demand for a vegetarian "state of society in which all human energies are to be directed towards the creation of complete happiness".

Schmid noted that Shelley's poetry quickly fell into two parts in reception: "Shelley was read either as an angelic, lyrical poet or as a rebel and revolutionary."

The well-known German-American revolutionary and women's rights activist Mathilde Franziska Anneke and her husband Fritz Anneke named their son Percy Shelley Anneke, who was born in Milwaukee in August 1850 . He later became a successful brewery entrepreneur in Duluth , MN.

During a Rolling Stones concert in London's Hyde Park on July 5, 1969, which became a memorial service for the recently deceased Brian Jones , Mick Jagger recited Adonais von Shelley in front of around 250,000 fans , and the Rolling Stones let hundreds of white butterflies fly . Following on from the text He is not dead, he doth not sleep. He has awakened from the dream of life ... a BBC documentary about the life of Jones' Brian Jones: Dream of Life was called.

Jeremy Corbyn recited from Shelley's poem Mask Of Anarchy in his address at Glastonbury Festival on June 24, 2017 :

Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number—
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you—
Ye are many — they are few.

("Rise up like lions after slumber / In insurmountable numbers - / Shake off your chains like dew / Who fell on you in your sleep - / You are many - they are few.")

and encouraged the young people present to see their common power that could change the world.

Works

Queen Mab by Percy Bysshe Shelley, first edition
  • The necessity of atheism (essay, 1809)
  • Zastrozzi (novel, 1810)
    • Zastrozzi. A romance and other early writings. Translated from English by a team of English students from the Free University of Berlin under the direction of Manfred Pfister. Karl Stutz Verlag, Passau 2008, ISBN 978-3-88849125-2 .
  • St Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian (Roman, 1811)
  • Queen Mab. A Philosophical Poem (1813)
  • Alastor, Or the Spirit of Solitude (1815)
    • Alastor, or The Spirit of Loneliness , adaptation by Adolf Strodtmann ( digitized 1866 in the Internet Archive)
  • Hymn to Intellectual Beauty (poem, 1816)
    • Hymn to spiritual beauty , adaptation by Adolf Strodtmann ( digitized 1866 in the Internet Archive)
  • Mont Blanc. (1816)
  • The Revolt of Islam. (1817)
  • Ozymandias . (1818)
  • Prometheus Unbound (drama, 1818)
  • The Masque of Anarchy. (1819)
  • Ode to the West Wind (poem, 1819)
    • Ode to the West Wind , adaptation by Julius Seybt ( digitized 1844 in the Internet Archive)
    • Ode to the West Wind , adaptation by Adolf Strodtmann ( digitized 1866 in the Internet Archive)
  • The Cenci (drama, 1819)
  • Hellas. (1821)
  • Adonais. An Elegy on the Death of John Keats (1821)
    • Adonais. An elegy on the death of John Keats , adaptation by Julius Seybt ( digitized 1844 in the Internet Archive)
  • Epipsychidion (1821)
    • Epipsychidion. To the noble and unhappy lady Emilia V - - now in the monastery - imprisoned , rewrite by Julius Seybt ( digitized 1844 in the Internet Archive)
  • A Defense of Poetry. (Essay, 1821)

Translation and retranslation

  • PB Shelley's The Cloud. Translated by Andreas Steinhöfel , with illustrations by Dirk Steinhöfel. Verlag Friedrich Oetinger, Hamburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-7891-7147-5 .
  • Adonais. An elegy on the death of John Keats. Translated by Günter Plessow. Edition Signathur, Dozwil 2012, ISBN 978-3-908141-88-4 .
  • Shelley's dream forward. Translated and commented by Erich F. Engler. Bilingual. Edition Rugerup, Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-942955-64-5 .

literature

Bibliographies

  • HB Forman: The Shelley Library. An Essay in Bibliography. (London, 1886; repr. New York, 1970 and 1975).
  • KK Engelberg: The Making of the Shelley Myth. An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism 1822-1860. (1988).

Work editions

  • The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley . Edited by Mrs. Shelley , 4 vols., London 1839.
  • The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley . Edited by Mrs. Shelley , London 1840.
  • The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley . Edited by Richard Herne Shepherd , 3 vols., London 1894.
  • The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley . Edited by Thomas Hutchinson , Oxford 1904.
  • The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Edited by Roger Ingpen & Walter E. Peck , 10 vols., London 1926–1930. (Julian Edition)
  • The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley . Edited by Frederick L. Jones , 2 vols., Oxford 1964.
  • Shelley's Prose or The Trumpet of a Prophecy . Edited by David Lee Clark , corrected edition, Albuquerque 1966.
  • The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Edited by Neville Rogers , 4 vols., Oxford 1972-1975.
  • Zastrozzi and St Irvyne . Edited by Stephen C. Behrendt , Oxford & New York 1986.
  • The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Edited by Donald H. Reiman & Neil Fraistat , 3 vols., Baltimore & London 2000–2012.
  • Shelley's Poetry and Prose . Selected & ed. by Donald H. Reiman & Neil Fraistat , 2nd ed., New York 2002.
  • The Major Works. Including poetry, prose and drama , ed. by Zachary Leader & Michael O'Neill , Oxford 2009.

Biographies and further reading

  • Richard Ackermann: Sources, role models, material for Shelley's poetic works. Deichert, Erlangen 1890.
  • Adrian : Percy Bysshe Shelley. In: Friedrich Christian August Hasse : Contemporaries. A biographical magazine for the history of our time , 3rd series, vol. 1. Brockhaus, Leipzig 1829, pp. 34–45 ( digitized from Google Books ).
  • James Bieri: Percy Bysshe Shelley. A biography. University of Delaware Press, Newark, Del. 2005.
  1. Youth's unextinguished fire. 1792-1816. ISBN 0-87413-870-1 .
  2. Exile of unfullfilled renown. 1816-1822. ISBN 0-87413-893-0 .
  • Kenneth N. Cameron: Young Shelley. The genesis of a radical. Octagon Books, New York 1973, ISBN 0-374-91255-6 .
  • Elmar Dod: The Reasonable Imagination in Enlightenment and Romanticism. A comparative study of Schiller's and Shelley's aesthetic theories in their European context. Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tübingen 1985, ISBN 3-484-18084-6 .
  • Karl Gutzkow : Shelley (1837). In: Gesammelte Werke , Vol. 9. Costenoble, Jena [1879], pp. 203–208 ( digitized in the Internet Archive ).
  • Paul Hamilton: Percy Bysshe Shelley. Northcote House, Tavistock 2000, ISBN 0-7463-0818-3 .
  • Rüdiger Hillgärtner: Bourgeois Individualism and Revolutionary Morality. Percy Bysshe Shelley. Thesen-Verlag, Darmstadt 1974, ISBN 3-7677-0015-8 .
  • Horst Höhne: Percy Bysshe Shelley. Life and work. Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1998, ISBN 3-631-47117-3 .
  • D. J. Hughes: Potentiality in Shelley's "Prometheus Unbound". In: Willi Erzgräber (Ed.): Interpretations Volume 8 - English literature from William Blake to Thomas Hardy. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt a. M. et al. 1970, pp. 91-112.
  • Heiner Jestrabek (Ed.): Percy Bysshe Shelley: "There Is No God!" Criticism of religion and rule. Freedom Tree, Reutlingen 2019, ISBN 978-3-922589-71-6 .
  • A. Leighton: Shelley and the Sublime. An Interpretation of the Major Poems , 1984.
  • André Maurois : Ariel or the life of Shelley ( Ariel ou la vie de Shelley ). Insel Verlag, Leipzig 1954.
  • Thomas Medwin : The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley , London 1847.
  • Hans-Ulrich Mielsch: Summer 1816. Lord Byron and the Shelleys at Lake Geneva. Verlag NZZ, Zurich 1998, ISBN 3-85823-707-8 .
  • Frank F. Pauly: The Truth of Poetry. P. B. Shelley's 'Defense of Poetry' in the context of the tradition of Neoplatonic poetologies. Universitätsverlag Winter, Heidelberg 2018, ISBN 978-3-8253-6885-2 .
  • Neville Rogers: Shelley at Work. A Critical Inquiry. Oxford University Press, 1956; repr. 1967.
  • Susanne Schmid: Shelley's German Afterlives 1814-2000 (Nineteenth Century Major Lives and Letters 1). Palgrave Macmillan, New York 2007, ISBN 978-1-4039-7750-2 ; repr. 2016, ISBN 978-1-349-53753-2 .
  • Mary Shelley : Notes to the complete poetical works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Indy Publishing, Maclean, Va. 2006, ISBN 1-4280-4548-1 .
  • Mary Shelley, Percy B. Shelley: Escape from England. Travel memories & letters from Geneva 1814–1816. Achilla-Presse, Hamburg 2002, ISBN 3-928398-81-4 .
  • ER Wasserman: Shelley. A critical reading. Baltimore, 1971.
  • Timothy Webb: Shelley. A voice not understood. University Press, Manchester 1977, ISBN 0-7190-0690-2 .
  • Ann Wroe: Being Shelley. The poet's search for himself. Cape, London 2007, ISBN 0-224-08078-4 .

Web links

Commons : Percy Bysshe Shelley  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Percy Bysshe Shelley  - Sources and full texts
Wikiquote: Percy Bysshe Shelley  - Quotes

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See Bernhard Fabian : The English literature. Volume 2: Authors. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 3rd edition, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-423-04495-0 , p. 351.
  2. ↑ Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things on Wikisource.
  3. ↑ Holmes, Richard: Shelley. The Pursuit , London 1974, 2/1994, new edition 2005 (Harper Perennial), pp. 54/55.
  4. ^ Glover, ASB: Shelley. Selected Poetry, Prose and Letters , London 1951 (The Nonesuch Press), p. 79.
  5. ↑ Holmes, Richard: Shelley. The Pursuit , London 1974, 2/1994, new edition 2005 (Harper Perennial), p. 201.
  6. ^ Glover, ASB: Shelley. Selected Poetry, Prose and Letters , London 1951 (The Nonesuch Press), p. 65.
  7. ^ Glover, ASB: Shelley. Selected Poetry, Prose and Letters , London 1951 (The Nonesuch Press), p. 1129.
  8. ↑ Holmes, Richard: Shelley. The Pursuit , London 1974, 2/1994, new edition 2005 (Harper Perennial), p. 321 ff.
  9. ^ Schmid, Susanne: Byron - Shelley - Keats. A biographical reading book , Munich 1999 (dtv), p. 200 ff.
  10. ↑ Holmes, Richard: Shelley. The Pursuit , London 1974, 2/1994, new edition 2005 (Harper Perennial), p. 352.
  11. ↑ See Bernhard Fabian : Die Englische Literatur. Volume 2: Authors. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 3rd edition, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-423-04495-0 , p. 353.
  12. ^ Glover, ASB: Shelley. Selected Poetry, Prose and Letters , London 1951 (The Nonesuch Press), p. 666 ff.
  13. ↑ Holmes, Richard: Shelley. The Pursuit , London 1974, 2/1994, new edition 2005 (Harper Perennial), p. 601.
  14. ↑ Holmes, Richard: Shelley. The Pursuit , London 1974, 2/1994, new edition 2005 (Harper Perennial), p. 613/14.
  15. ↑ Holmes, Richard: Shelley. The Pursuit , London 1974, 2/1994, new edition 2005 (Harper Perennial), pp. 647/48.
  16. ^ Glover, ASB: Shelley. Selected Poetry, Prose and Letters , London 1951 (The Nonesuch Press), pp. 547/48.
  17. ↑ Holmes, Richard: Shelley. The Pursuit , London 1974, 2/1994, new edition 2005 (Harper Perennial), p. 656.
  18. ^ Schmid, Susanne: Byron - Shelley - Keats. A biographical reading book , Munich 1999 (dtv), p. 271.
  19. ^ Glover, ASB: Shelley. Selected Poetry, Prose and Letters , London 1951 (The Nonesuch Press), p. 559.
  20. ^ Glover, ASB: Shelley. Selected Poetry, Prose and Letters , London 1951 (The Nonesuch Press), pp. 1026 and 1055.
  21. ↑ Holmes, Richard: Shelley. The Pursuit , London 1974, 2/1994, new edition 2005 (Harper Perennial), p. 208.
  22. ↑ Holmes, Richard: Shelley. The Pursuit , London 1974, 2/1994, reprint 2005 (Harper Perennial), p. 209.
  23. ^ Matthias Rude: Antispeciesism. The liberation of humans and animals in the animal rights movement and the left. Stuttgart 2013, p. 72f.
  24. ^ Schmid, Susanne: Byron - Shelley - Keats. A biographical reading book , Munich 1999 (dtv), p. 304.
  25. ↑ Jeremy Corbyn in Glastonbury on June 24, 2017, video on YouTube .
personal data
SURNAME Shelley, Percy Bysshe
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English writer
DATE OF BIRTH 4th August 1792
PLACE OF BIRTH Field Place , Sussex
DATE OF DEATH July 8, 1822
Place of death at La Spezia