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Updated: May 28, 2025
Born in 1792, drowned at Spezia, Italy, in 1822; educated at Eton and Oxford, being expelled from the latter for publishing a pamphlet on atheism; married Harriet Westbrook in 1811; met Mary Woolstonecraft in 1814, and went to live with her in Switzerland, abandoning Harriet; returned to England in 1815 and settled near Windsor Forest; joined Byron in Switzerland in 1816; in the same year, Harriet having drowned herself, he married Mary; his body consumed on a funeral pyre at Spezia in the presence of Leigh Hunt, Byron and Trelawny; published "Queen Mab" in 1813; "Alastor" in 1816; "Prometheus Unbound" in 1820; his works collected by his wife in 1830.
He ran up to him, bestrode him, and covered him with his shield; then two of his staunch comrades, Mecisteus son of Echius, and Alastor, stooped down, and bore him away groaning heavily to the ships. But Idomeneus ceased not his fury. He kept on striving continually either to enshroud some Trojan in the darkness of death, or himself to fall while warding off the evil day from the Achaeans.
"Alastor", on the contrary, contains an individual interest only. A very few years, with their attendant events, had checked the ardour of Shelley's hopes, though he still thought them well-grounded, and that to advance their fulfilment was the noblest task man could achieve. This is neither the time nor place to speak of the misfortunes that chequered his life.
It was a place to quote Alastor in, and nothing but a bad memory prevented my affrighting the oaks and rills with declamation. As it was, I could only recall the lines "The Poet wandering on, through Arabie And Persia, and the wild Carmanian waste, And o'er the aerial mountains which pour down Indus and Oxus from their icy caves " and that other passage beginning
In 'Alastor', the poet, at the opening of his career, had pursued in vain through the wilderness of the world a vision of ideal loveliness; it would now seem that this vision is at last embodied in "the noble and unfortunate Lady Emilia Viviani," to whom 'Epipsychidion' is addressed. Shelley begins by exhausting, in the effort to express her perfection, all the metaphors that rapture can suggest.
This was a time in which they could grow really to know each other without reserve, when there need be no jealous competition as to who was most proficient in Greek or Latin; when Shelley was drawn to poetry, and Alastor was contemplated, the melancholy strain of which seems to indicate love as the only redeeming element of life, and which might well follow the time of turmoil in Shelley's career.
There was also Tros the son of Alastor he came up to Achilles and clasped his knees in the hope that he would spare him and not kill him but let him go, because they were both of the same age. Fool, he might have known that he should not prevail with him, for the man was in no mood for pity or forbearance but was in grim earnest.
Their impulse was well-nigh to prostrate themselves in lamentation before untimely rains and tempests, which came as the Alastor of those households whose crime it was to be poor. After midsummer they watched the weather-cocks as men waiting in antechambers watch the lackey. Sun elated them; quiet rain sobered them; weeks of watery tempest stupefied them.
He never intended to publish "Queen Mab" as it stands; but a few years after, when printing "Alastor", he extracted a small portion which he entitled "The Daemon of the World". In this he changed somewhat the versification, and made other alterations scarcely to be called improvements. Some years after, when in Italy, a bookseller published an edition of "Queen Mab" as it originally stood.
Returning to England in 1815 he wrote his first really great poem, Alastor , followed by the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, Prince Athanase, Rosalind and Helen, and Laon and Cythna, afterwards called the Revolt of Islam . In 1818 he left England never to return, and went to Italy, and in the next two years while at Rome produced his two greatest works, the tragedy of The Cenci and Prometheus Unbound . He removed to Venice in 1820 in the company of Byron, and there wrote Julian and Maddalo, a poetic record of discussions between them.
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