Percy Bysshe Shelley A Major Figure Among the English Romantic Poets, His Unconventional Life and Great Literary Work

Shelley is one of the best poets of the period of English romanticism. He belongs to the second group of romantic poets, together with John Keats and the great Lord Byron. Shelley’s life itself is very interesting and unusual, he went through so many difficulties, tragedies, troubles, tension and oppression, confrontations, etc, he could not find peace anywhere, he moved from one place to the other, from one country to another, etc. Beside personal problems, emotional and health problems, he could not accept the social reality England was living. Politics was another issue that tackled him, and he openly expressed his opinion, what made him a kind of state enemy. He met and was influenced by many great people of that time, who had a very important role in his life. These people, like Godwin, developed his political and ideological belief, etc. All his belief, his opinion, his ideology, was put on paper, he expressed it through his great works that he wrote. He faced very harsh criticism from the early days in Oxford, when his work Necessity of Atheism established him as an atheist. He expressed his esthetics in his greatest works. All his literary work can be classified in long narrative poems and lyrical poems, which cover topics ranging from politics, revolutionary, and philosophical, where we can notice Shelley’s dissatisfaction with state institutions and the state itself, and his desire for human wellbeing and freedom as well, to poems with meditative ideas, love poems, visionary ones, which express Shelley’s emotions, burst feelings, love, pain and spiritual joy. His greatest narrative poems are: Prometheus Unbound, Triumph of Life, Queen Mab, Julian and Maddalo, Adonais, Alastor, Mask of Anarchy, etc and his best lyrics: Ode to the West Wind, The Cloud, To Skylark, Mont Blank, The Indian Serenade, England in 1819, Ozymandias, and many others.Keywords: P. B. Shelley, Romanticism, Poems, Lyrics, Revolutionary