PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
1792–1822
Selected Poems
Shelley was born in Sussex, the son of an MP, in 1792. His family intending him for a Parliamentary career, he was educated at Eton and Oxford, but he disliked both and was mocked by his fellow students. He continuously challenged all authority and was finally expelled because of a pamphlet titled “The Necessity of Atheism.” He didn’t care; he wanted out anyway.
He quarreled with his father, and just to show him eloped to Scotland with a sixteen-year-old. They were married, despite the fact that he disapproved of matrimony—as well as royalty, religion, and meat-eating. Before long he was sharing young Harriet with a friend and trying to establish some sort of commune. Not long afterward Harriet drowned herself, but by that time he had formed a relationship with Mary Godwin. They had a son, William, and lived in Geneva with Byron, talking about poetry and life and so forth.
Shelley had very little money and large debts, so he and Mary decamped to Italy intending to live permanently abroad. She kept at, and finished, a novel she had been working on: Frankenstein, which became one of the all-time bestsellers, though, not surprisingly, she gained almost nothing from its fame. Shelley was just now beginning to write well; the first flowering was the poem “Ozymandias.” It is in every anthology of English poetry, and if you haven’t read it in high school, you ought to read it now. There are a couple of tricks in it, so beware. Shelley also wrote a “Greek” play called “Prometheus,” which is very fine. It did not make up for the fact that his little son died and Mary had a nervous breakdown.
Shelley, well aware of the stir he and Byron were making, took every advantage of his fame/notoriety. “Ode to the West Wind” was much admired—appropriately—as was “To a Skylark” and his famous “Defense of Poetry,” in which he declared that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” It was a clarion call as well as a backward-looking challenge to Pope and his couplets. In the spring of 1821, news came of Keats’s death, and Shelley rushed to Rome to see what he could do. Apparently Keats had wanted a stone over his grave in the English Cemetery at Rome with no name and the simple inscription: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” Shelley arranged for this, shaking his head and weeping at the same time. To die so young!
Only a year later his time came, in April 1822, when a small schooner he was sailing across a bay was struck by a sudden squall and sank immediately, its wet sails dragging it beneath the water. He was thirty years old, a little older than Keats, yes, but just a little younger than Byron. He had been called “mad Shelley” at school, and he was always partly that—but also a very fine, but perhaps not great, poet.
JOHN KEATS
1795–1821
Selected Poems
Unlike Shelley and Byron, Keats was the son of a commoner, his father being the manager of a livery stable near London. His father died when he was eight, his mother when he was fourteen. There was very little money, and he was to a large extent self-educated, reading poetry from childhood and trying to write it in his early teens. When he was twenty he signed on as a student at Guy’s Hospital and the next year was licensed as an apothecary. In that year—1815—he met Leigh Hunt, who published a couple of poems in The Examiner, and followed them by “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” which showed promise. Other poems followed but they were savagely attacked by critics who called him a member of the so-called Cockney school. Keats was hurt but he was able to say to his brother George: “I think I shall be among the English poets after my death.”
In 1816, he buried his beloved brother Tom and met Fanny Brawne, with whom he fell in love. The feelings were reciprocated. They probably planned to marry, although events intervened. During the summer of 1818 he suffered from recurrent sore throats; these frightened him because Tom, like their mother, had died of consumption and he feared for the worst. Nevertheless, the winter and spring of that year are known as “the Great Year,” and they are indeed a manifestation of a greater genius than any other poet of his age could show. Or perhaps of any age.
It began in November when, in just a few months, he wrote, consecutively, “The Eve of St. Agnes,” “Ode to Psyche,” “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode on Melancholy,” “Ode on Indolence,” the second version of “Hyperion,” and “To Autumn.” Is it unbelievable? Yes, it is unbelievable.
There is a story about the writing of almost all of these great poems, but the one about “Nightingale” is my favorite. It was spring, the weather was soft and warm, and Keats was lying in a hammock underneath a tree. His friend Charles Brown saw that he had a piece of paper and a pen with which he seemed to be writing, not continuously but from time to time. A nightingale was singing—Brown could hear it. Keats lay in the hammock for no more than two hours and then rose and came into the house. He had a few sheets of paper in his hand that he folded and placed in the cover of a book, which he returned to the shelf.
“Were you writing something?” Brown asked. Keats nodded. The poem is of course the “Ode to a Nightingale.” Probably there is no greater lyric poem in English.
In the fall of that year Keats was very ill. Shelley wrote and asked him to come to Italy, where, he said, the climate would be better for him than that of a London winter. He arrived in Rome in December 1820 and died of consumption the following February. He was twenty-five. He and his friend Severn lived in a small house on the Piazza di Spagne that is now a museum. You can go there and see the narrow room in which he died. There is a window overlooking that famous piazza, so full of life and gaiety.
JANE AUSTEN
1775–1817
Pride and Prejudice
Emma
Persuasion
Jane Austen was born in 1775 in a Hampshire village, the daughter of an English small-town rector. She lived an uneventful life and never married, devoting herself instead—in return for a house given to her and her sister by their married brother—to her many nieces and nephews, all of whom, it is said, adored their aunt Jane. She was a true amateur; she wrote for the pleasure of it. But she was also a very great writer, so this hobby of hers ended up taking over much of her life.
She began to write as a child and kept at it until her untimely death, at forty, of a wasting disease that has not been certainly identified. She did not publish anything until 1811, when she was thirty-five, and then she published anonymously; few outside of her immediate family knew she was the author of Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Persuasion, and her other books. One who did know—the Prince Regent, later George IV—liked her works so much that he possessed a set of them in each of his residences, and after a “discrete royal command” Emma was “respectfully dedicated” to him by the author. Jane Austen was, however, “this nameless author” to Sir Walter Scott when, in the Quarterly Review for March 1816, he praised this “masterful exponent of the modern novel,” who was pleased by the review but coolly noted that he had not mentioned Mansfield Park in it.