Abstract
Percy Bysshe Shelley (Fig. 12) was born at Field Place near Horsham, Sussex, on 4 August 1792, two months after the publication of Darwin’s Economy of Vegetation and one month before the ‘September massacres’ started to stain the Revolution in France with blood. He was the eldest son of a solid Sussex landowner, Timothy Shelley, a Whig MP who inherited his father’s baronetcy in 1815. The young Shelley was sent to Eton in 1804, where he suffered several years of baiting from his schoolfellows but benefited from the teaching of two remarkable men of science. The first was the itinerant lecturer Adam Walker, who gave regular courses and captivated Shelley: the boy liked to carry Walker’s experiments to dangerous extremes — he gave his tutor severe electrical shocks, flew fire-balloons and dabbled with gunpowder.
Darwin made a profound impression upon Shelley’s thought and imagination.
Carl Grabo, A Newton among Poets, p. 200
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References
Harold Bloom, Shelley’s Mythmaking (Yale Univ. Pr., New Haven, 1958).
Richard Cronin, Shelley’s Poetic Thoughts (Macmillan, 1981).
Stuart Curran, Shelley’s Annus Mirabilis (Huntington Library, San Marino, California, 1975).
Carl Grabo, A Newton among Poets (Univ. of N. Carolina Pr., Chapel Hill, NC, 1930).
T. J. Hogg, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley (2 vols, 1858) 2 vols (Dent, 1933).
Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974; Quartet Books paperback, 1976).
Desmond King-Hele, Shelley: His Thought and Work, 3rd edn (Macmillan, 1984).
P. B. Shelley, Letters, ed. F. L. Jones, 2 vols (OUP, 1964).
P. B. Shelley, Poetical Works, ed. T. Hutchinson; corrected by G. M. Matthews (OUP, 1970).
Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. D. H. Reiman and S. B. Powers (W. W. Norton, New York, 1977).
E. B. Silverman, Poetic Synthesis in Shelley’s ‘Adonais’ (Mouton, The Hague, 1972).
Earl R. Wasserman, Shelley: A Critical Reading (Johns Hopkins Pr., Baltimore, 1971).
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© 1986 Desmond King-Hele
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King-Hele, D. (1986). Shelley. In: Erasmus Darwin and the Romantic Poets. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18098-1_8
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