ABSTRACT
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) was born three years after the French Revolution began, and like many of his contemporaries, he was inspired by what had been its promise and haunted by its failures. Shelley died in a boating accident while living abroad in Italy, 10 years before the Great Reform Bill passed in 1832. Although Shelley died quite young, just prior to his thirtieth birthday, his extensive literary corpus has proven pivotal in defining the shifting cultural relevance of literature. While the Victorians praised him as a visionary lyric poet, he is, to quote Timothy Morton, increasingly acknowledged as
a protean writer, working in almost every corner of cultural and literary space in the Romantic period: from the upper class to the radical underground; from heterosexual love poetry to prose on homosexuality; from very subtle figurations to pugnacious political verse; from lyric to drama. 1
Shelley's writing responded to the forces of political conflict as well as those of personal loss. In Shelley's youth, Napoleon's armies threatened every European monarch and reached, often in conflict with British forces, to almost every corner of the world. The Napoleonic wars, Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo in 1815 and the revolts, popular uprisings and messianic movements of this period, created, according to C.A. Bayly, a general and critical disruption on a scale that had not been seen since the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century. 2 Notwithstanding the period's political upheavals, which included the overthrow of the Bourbon monarchy, the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the formation of global political alignments, the post-Waterloo political order looked surprisingly similar to the ancien régime that had initially sparked revolutionary violence in France. The Ottoman Porte, the English and French monarchies and even the papacy emerged from this worldwide destruction like the survivors of Prospero's tempest: distressed by what seemed an apparent loss, but mysteriously renewed and revived, as if nothing had happened.