Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley (4 August 1792 – 8 July 1822) was one of the major English romantic poets, widely considered to be among the finest lyric poets in the English language; husband of Mary Shelley.
 * See also: Essay on Christianity (c. 1815–1817; published 1859)

Quotes
All the modes of distress Which torture the tenants of earth; And the various evils, Which like so many devils, Attend the poor souls from their birth.
 * You would not easily guess
 * "Verses On A Cat" (1800), St. 2, as published in Life of Shelley (1858) by Thomas Jefferson Hogg, p. 21

The shadows that float o'er Eternity's vale; Nought waits for the good but a spirit of Love, That will hail their blest advent to regions above. For Love, Mortal, gleams through the gloom of my sway, And the shades which surround me fly fast at its ray.
 * Cease, cease, wayward Mortal! I dare not unveil
 * "Death" in an untitled dialogue (1809); published in Life of Shelley (1858) by Thomas Jefferson Hogg, p. 197

To live alone, an isolated thing?
 * Dar'st thou amid the varied multitude
 * "The Solitary" (1810), st. 1

Lone, lean, and hunted by his brother's hate, Hath drunk so deep the cup of bitter fate As that poor wretch who cannot, cannot love: He bears a load which nothing can remove, A killing, withering weight.
 * Not the swart Pariah in some Indian grove,
 * "The Solitary" (1810), st. 2

Although on earth ’tis planted, Where its honours blow, While by earth’s slaves the leaves are riven Which die the while they glow.
 * Sweet the rose which lives in Heaven,
 * Untitled (1810); titled "Love's Rose" by William Michael Rossetti in Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1870)

But perfidy can blast the flower, Even when in most unwary hour It blooms in Fancy's bower. Age cannot Love destroy, But perfidy can rend the shrine In which its vermeil splendours shine.
 * Age cannot Love destroy,
 * Untitled (1810); titled "Love's Rose" by William Michael Rossetti in Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1870)


 * Here I swear, and as I break my oath may Infinity Eternity blast me, here I swear that never will I forgive Christianity! It is the only point on which I allow myself to encourage revenge... Oh, how I wish I were the Antichrist, that it were mine to crush the Demon, to hurl him to his native Hell never to rise again — I expect to gratify some of this insatiable feeling in Poetry.
 * Letter to Thomas Jefferson Hogg (3 January 1811)


 * I think that the leaf of a tree, the meanest insect on wh. we trample are in themselves arguments more conclusive than any which can be adduced that some vast intellect animates Infinity.
 * Letter to Thomas Jefferson Hogg (3 January 1811)

Beelzebub arose, With care his sweet person adorning, He put on his Sunday clothes.
 * Once, early in the morning,
 * The Devil's Walk (1812), st. 1


 * I am willing to admit that some few axioms of morality, which Christianity has borrowed from the philosophers of Greece and India, dictate, in an unconnected state, rules of conduct worthy of regard; but the purest and most elevated lessons of morality must remain nugatory, the most probable inducements to virtue must fail of their effect, so long as the slightest weight is attached to that dogma which is the vital essence of revealed religion.
 * A Refutation of Deism, 1814


 * The butchering of harmless animals cannot fail to produce much of that spirit of insane and hideous exultation in which news of a victory is related altho' purchased by the massacre of a hundred thousand men. If the use of animal food be in consequence, subversive to the peace of human society, how unwarrantable is the injustice and barbarity which is exercised toward these miserable victims. They are called into existence by human artifice that they may drag out a short and miserable existence of slavery and disease, that their bodies may be mutilated, their social feelings outraged. It were much better that a sentient being should never have existed, than that it should have existed only to endure unmitigated misery.
 * "On the Vegetable System of Diet" (c. 1815; published in the 1920s), in Complete Works, ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck, Volume 6 (New York: Gordian Press, 1965), pp. 343-344, original emphasis

Entwined in duskier wreaths her braided locks O'er the fair front and radiant eyes of day, Night followed, clad with stars.
 * Twilight, ascending slowly from the east,
 * Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude (1816)


 * The lone couch of his everlasting sleep.
 * Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude (1816), line 57

Visit the soul in sleep, — that death is slumber, And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber Of those who wake and live.
 * Some say that gleams of a remoter world
 * Mont Blanc (1816), st. 3

We rise. — One wandering thought pollutes the day; We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep; Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away: It is the same! — For, be it joy or sorrow, The path of its departure still is free: Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow; Nought may endure but Mutability.
 * We rest. — A dream has power to poison sleep;
 * Mutability (1816), st. 4

Even as the winds and waters are; I could lie down like a tired child, And weep away the life of care Which I have borne and yet must bear, Till death like sleep might steal on me, And I might feel in the warm air My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea Breathe o'er my dying brain its last monotony.
 * Yet now despair itself is mild,
 * Stanzas Written in Dejection Near Naples (1818), st. 5

Ocean's child, and then his queen; Now is come a darker day, And thou soon must be his prey.
 * Sun-girt City, thou hast been
 * Lines Written among the Euganean Hills (1818)

Poets' food is love and fame.'''
 * '''Chameleons feed on light and air:
 * An Exhortation (1819), st. 1


 * Fame is love disguised.
 * An Exhortation (1819), st. 2

For the lords who lay ye low?'''
 * '''Men of England, wherefore plough
 * Song to the Men of England (1819), st. 1

The wealth ye find another keeps; The robes ye weave another wears; The arms ye forge another bears.
 * The seed ye sow another reaps;
 * Song to the Men of England (1819), st. 5

All things by a law divine In one spirit meet and mingle — Why not I with thine?
 * Nothing in the world is single,
 * Love's Philosophy (1819), st. 1

And the moonbeams kiss the sea: What are all these kissings worth If thou kiss not me?
 * The sunlight clasps the earth,
 * Love's Philosophy (1819), st. 2

In the first sweet sleep of night, When the winds are breathing low, And the stars are shining bright.
 * I arise from dreams of thee
 * The Indian Serenade (1819), st. 1

I die! I faint! I fail! Let thy love in kisses rain On my lips and eyelids pale. My cheek is cold and white, alas! My heart beats loud and fast: O press it to thine own again, Where it will break at last!
 * O lift me from the grass!
 * The Indian Serenade (1819), st. 3

A populous and smoky city.'''
 * '''Hell is a city much like London —
 * Peter Bell the Third (1819), Pt. III, st. 1

Where small talk dies in agonies.
 * Teas,
 * Peter Bell the Third (1819), Pt. III, st. 12

Dull,—oh so dull, so very dull! Whether he talked, wrote, or rehearsed, Still with this dulness was he cursed! Dull,—beyond all conception, dull.
 * Peter was dull; he was at first
 * Peter Bell the Third (1819), Pt. VII, st. 11

And I will taste no other wine tonight.
 * I have drunken deep of joy,
 * The Cenci (1819), Act I, sc. iii, l. 88

Which severs those it should unite; Let us remain together still, Then it will be good night.
 * Good-night? ah! no; the hour is ill
 * Good-Night (1819)

Of accusation kills an innocent name, And leaves for lame acquittal the poor life, Which is a mask without it.
 * The breath
 * The Cenci (1819)

Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow Through public scorn, — mud from a muddy spring, — Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know, But leech-like to their fainting country cling, Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow.
 * An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king, —
 * English in 1819 (1819), l. 1

From her own beauty.
 * A lovely lady, garmented in light
 * The Witch of Atlas (1820), st. 5

Our hopes, and then our fears — and when These are dead, the debt is due, Dust claims dust — and we die too.
 * First our pleasures die — and then
 * Death (1820), st. 3

Daisies, those pearl'd Arcturi of the earth, The constellated flower that never sets; Faint oxlips; tender bluebells at whose birth The sod scarce heaved; and that tall flower that wets Its mother's face with heaven-collected tears, When the low wind, its playmate's voice, it hears.
 * There grew pied wind-flowers and violets,
 * The Question (1820), st. 2

When a man marries, dies, or turns Hindoo, His best friends hear no more of him?
 * Have you not heard
 * Letter to Maria Gisborne (1820), l. 235

Makes such a wound, the knife is lost in it.
 * His fine wit
 * Letter to Maria Gisborne (1820), l. 240

Yet let's be merry: we'll have tea and toast; Custards for supper, and an endless host Of syllabubs and jellies and mince-pies, And other such ladylike luxuries.
 * Though we eat little flesh and drink no wine,
 * Letter to Maria Gisborne (1820), l. 302

And the young winds fed it with silver dew, And it opened its fan-like leaves to the light. And closed them beneath the kisses of Night.
 * A Sensitive Plant in a garden grew,
 * The Sensitive Plant (1820), Pt. I, st. 1

Grief too sad for song; Wild wind, when sullen cloud Knells all the night long; Sad storm, whose tears are vain, Bare woods, whose branches strain, Deep caves and dreary main, — Wail, for the world's wrong!
 * Rough wind, the moanest loud
 * A Dirge (1821)

Vibrates in the memory — Odours, when sweet violets sicken, Live within the sense they quicken. Rose leaves, when the rose is dead, Are heaped for the beloved's bed; And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone, Love itself shall slumber on.
 * Music, when soft voices die,
 * Music, When Soft Voices Die (1821)

For me to profane it; One feeling too falsely disdained For thee to disdain it.
 * One word is too often profaned
 * One Word is Too Often Profaned (1821), st. 1

Of the night for the morrow, The devotion to something afar From the sphere of our sorrow.
 * The desire of the moth for the star,
 * One Word is Too Often Profaned (1821), st. 2

Spirit of Night! Out of the misty eastern cave Where, all the long and lone daylight, Thou wovest dreams of joy and fear, Which make thee terrible and dear, — Swift be thy flight!
 * Swiftly walk over the western wave,
 * To Night (1821), st. 1

Soon, too soon — Sleep will come when thou art fled; Of neither would I ask the boon I ask of thee, beloved Night — Swift be thine approaching flight, Come soon, soon!
 * Death will come when thou art dead,
 * To Night (1821), st. 5

Is on one side.
 * There is no sport in hate where all the rage
 * Lines to a Reviewer (1821), l. 3

The light in the dust lies dead — When the cloud is scattered, The rainbow's glory is shed.''' When the lute is broken, Sweet tones are remembered not; When the lips have spoken, Loved accents are soon forgot.
 * '''When the lamp is shattered
 * When the Lamp is Shattered (1822), st. 1

Call Life.
 * Lift not the painted veil which those who live
 * "Sonnet" (1824)

Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth, Wandering companionless Among the stars that have a different birth''', — And ever changing, like a joyless eye That finds no object worth its constancy?
 * '''Art thou pale for weariness
 * "To the Moon" (published 1824)

Two scorpions under one wet stone, Two bloodless wolves whose dry throats rattle, Two crows perched on the murrained cattle, Two vipers tangled into one.
 * Are ye, two vultures sick for battle,
 * Similes for Two Political Characters of 1819 (Published 1832), st. 4

Whom mortals call the moon.
 * That orbed maiden with white fire laden,
 * The Cloud, iv; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)


 * What! alive, and so bold, O earth?
 * Written on hearing the News of the Death of Napoleon; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

A tone Of some world far from ours, Where music and moonlight and feeling Are one.
 * Sing again, with your dear voice revealing
 * To Jane. The keen Stars were twinkling; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

For this is the most civil sort of lie That can be given to a man's face. I now Say what I think.
 * You lie—under a mistake,
 * Translation of Calderon's Magico Prodigioso, Scene i; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

The Necessity of Atheism (1811)
This negation must be understood solely to affect a creative Deity. The hypothesis of a pervading Spirit co-eternal with the universe remains unshaken.
 * There is no God!

If he is infinitely wise, why should we have doubts concerning our future? If he knows all, why warn him of our needs and fatigue him with our prayers? If he is everywhere, why erect temples to him? If he is just, why fear that he will punish the creatures that he has filled with weaknesses? If grace does everything for them, what reason would he have for recompensing them? If he is all-powerful, how offend him, how resist him? If he is reasonable, how can he be angry at the blind, to whom he has given the liberty of being unreasonable? If he is immovable, by what right do we pretend to make him change his decrees? If he is inconceivable, why occupy ourselves with him? If he has spoken, why is the universe not convinced? If the knowledge of a God is the most necessary, why is it not the most evident and the clearest?
 * If he is infinitely good, what reason should we have to fear him?


 * The body is placed under the earth, and after a certain period there remains no vestige even of its form. This is that contemplation of inexhaustible melancholy, whose shadow eclipses the brightness of the world. The common observer is struck with dejection of the spectacle. He contends in vain against the persuasion of the grave, that the dead indeed cease to be. The corpse at his feet is prophetic of his own destiny. Those who have preceded him, and whose voice was delightful to his ear; whose touch met his like sweet and subtle fire: whose aspect spread a visionary light upon his path — these he cannot meet again.


 * We must prove design before we can infer a designer.
 * Alternate: Design must be proved before a designer can be inferred.

"Declaration of Rights" (1812)

 * GOVERNMENT has no rights; it is a delegation from several individuals for the purpose of securing their own. It is therefore just, only so far as it exists by their consent, useful only so far as it operates to their well-being.
 * Article 1


 * No man has a right to disturb the public peace, by personally resisting the execution of a law however bad. He ought to acquiesce, using at the same time the utmost powers of his reason, to promote its repeal.
 * Article 9


 * Man has no right to kill his brother, it is no excuse that he does so in uniform. He only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder.
 * Article 19


 * Belief is involuntary; nothing involuntary is meritorious or reprehensible. A man ought not to be considered worse or better for his belief.
 * Article 23


 * A Christian, a Deist, a Turk, and a Jew, have equal rights: they are men and brethren.
 * Article 24


 * If a person's religious ideas correspond not with your own, love him nevertheless. How different would yours have been, had the chance of birth placed you in Tartary or India!
 * Article 25


 * Titles are tinsel, power a corruptor, glory a bubble, and excessive wealth, a libel on its possessor.
 * Article 27

Queen Mab (1813)

 * Full text online at Bartleby.com

Death and his brother Sleep!
 * How wonderful is Death,
 * Canto I


 * The king ... like the vulgar, thinks, feels, acts, and lives Just as his father did; the unconquered powers Of precedent and custom interpose Between a king and virtue.
 * Canto III, lines 97-100

The subject, not the citizen; for kings And subjects, mutual foes, forever play A losing game into each other's hands, Whose stakes are vice and misery. The man Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys. Power, like a desolating pestilence, Pollutes whate'er it touches; and obedience, Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth, Makes slaves of men, and of the human frame A mechanized automaton.
 * Nature rejects the monarch, not the man;
 * Canto III

Studded with stars unutterably bright, Through which the moon's unclouded grandeur rolls, Seems like a canopy which love has spread To curtain her sleeping world.
 * Heaven's ebon vault,
 * Canto IV

The lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade.
 * War is the statesman's game, the priest's delight,
 * Canto IV

The fairest feelings of the opening heart, Is destined to decay, whilst from the soil Shall spring all virtue, all delight, all love, And judgment cease to wage unnatural war With passion's unsubduable array.
 * Thus suicidal selfishness, that blights
 * Canto V

Rival in crime and falsehood, aping all The wanton horrors of her bloody play; Yet frozen, unimpassioned, spiritless, Shunning the light, and owning not its name, Compelled by its deformity to screen With flimsy veil of justice and of right Its unattractive lineaments that scare All save the brood of ignorance; at once The cause and the effect of tyranny; Unblushing, hardened, sensual and vile; Dead to all love but of its abjectness; With heart impassive by more noble powers Than unshared pleasure, sordid gain, or fame; Despising its own miserable being, Which still it longs, yet fears, to disenthrall.
 * Twin-sister of Religion, Selfishness!
 * Canto V

All earthly things but virtue.
 * Gold is a living god and rules in scorn,
 * Canto V


 * The word of God has fenced about all crimes with Holiness.
 * Canto VII

He slays the lamb that looks him in the face, And horribly devours his mangled flesh.
 * And man ... no longer now
 * Canto VIII


 * A husband and wife ought to continue so long united as they love each other. Any law which should bind them to cohabitation for one moment after the decay of their affection, would be a most intolerable tyranny, and the most unworthy of toleration.
 * Notes


 * Love is free: to promise for ever to love the same woman, is not less absurd than to promise to believe the same creed: such a vow in both cases, excludes us from all enquiry.
 * Notes


 * Chastity is a monkish and evangelical superstition, a greater foe to natural temperance even than unintellectual sensuality; it strikes at the root of all domestic happiness, and consigns more than half the human race to misery.
 * Notes


 * It is only by softening and disguising dead flesh by culinary preparation, that it is rendered susceptible of mastication or digestion; and that the sight of its bloody juices and raw horror does not excite intolerable loathing and disgust.
 * Notes

A Vindication of Natural Diet (1813)

 * Full text online at the Internet Archive (London: F. Pitman and Manchester: J. Heywood, 1884)


 * It is only by softening and disguising dead flesh by culinary preparation that it is rendered susceptible of mastication or digestion, and that the sight of its bloody juices and raw horror does not excite intolerable loathing and disgust.


 * Should ever a physician be born with the genius of Locke, I am persuaded that he might trace all bodily and mental derangements to our unnatural habits, as clearly as that philosopher has traced all knowledge to sensation.


 * There is no disease, bodily or mental, which adoption of vegetable diet and pure water has not infallibly mitigated, wherever the experiment has been fairly tried. Debility is gradually converted into strength, disease into healthfulness: madness, in all its hideous variety, from the ravings of the fettered maniac, to the unaccountable irrationalities of ill-temper, that make a hell of domestic life, into a calm and considerable evenness of temper, that alone might offer a certain pledge of the future moral reformation of society.


 * By all that is sacred in our hopes for the human race, I conjure those who love happiness and truth, to give a fair trial to the vegetable system.


 * The spirit of the nation that should take the lead in this great reform would insensibly become agricultural: commerce, with all its vice, selfishness, and corruption, would gradually decline; more natural habits would produce gentler manners, and the excessive complication of political relations would be so far simplified that every individual might feel and understand why he loved his country, and took a personal interest in its welfare.

On a Future State (1815; publ. 1840)

 * On a Future State


 * It has been the persuasion of an immense majority of human beings in all ages and nations that we continue to live after death,—that apparent termination of all the functions of sensitive and intellectual existence. Nor has mankind been contented with supposing that species of existence which some philosophers have asserted; namely, the resolution of the component parts of the mechanism of a living being into its elements, and the impossibility of the minutest particle of these sustaining the smallest diminution. They have clung to the idea that sensibility and thought, which they have distinguished from the objects of it, under the several names of spirit and matter, is, in its own nature, less susceptible of division and decay, and that, when the body is resolved into its elements, the principle which animated it will remain perpetual and unchanged.


 * Some philosophers—and those to whom we are indebted for the most stupendous discoveries in physical science, suppose... that intelligence is the mere result of certain combinations among the particles of its objects; and those among them who believe that we live after death, recur to the interposition of a supernatural power, which shall overcome the tendency inherent in all material combinations, to dissipate and be absorbed into other forms.


 * Let us bring the question to the test of experience and fact; and ask ourselves, considering our nature in its entire extent, what light we derive from a sustained and comprehensive view of its component parts, which may enable us to assert with certainty that we do or do not live after death.


 * If it be proved that the world is ruled by a Divine Power, no inference necessarily can be drawn from that circumstance in favour of a future state.


 * Should it be proved... that the mysterious principle which regulates the proceedings of the universe, is neither intelligent nor sensitive, yet it is not an inconsistency to suppose at the same time, that the animating power survives the body which it has animated, by laws as independent of any supernatural agent as those through which it first became united with it. Nor, if a future state be clearly proved, does it follow that it will be a state of punishment or reward.


 * The natural philosopher, in addition to the sensations common to all men inspired by the event of death, believes that he sees with more certainty that it is attended with the annihilation of sentiment and thought. He observes the mental powers increase and fade with those of the body, and even accommodate themselves to the most transitory changes of our physical nature. Sleep suspends many of the faculties of the vital and intellectual principle; drunkenness and disease will either temporarily or permanently derange them. Madness or idiotcy may utterly extinguish the most excellent and delicate of those powers. In old age the mind gradually withers; and as it grew and was strengthened with the body, so does it together with the body sink into decrepitude. Assuredly these are convincing evidences that so soon as the organs of the body are subjected to the laws of inanimate matter, sensation, and perception, and apprehension are at an end.


 * It is probable that what we call thought is not an actual being, but no more than the relation between certain parts of that infinitely varied mass, of which the rest of the universe is composed, and which ceases to exist as soon as those parts change their position with regard to each other.

Hymn to Intellectual Beauty (1816)

 * Written 1816, published 1817 · Full text online at Poetry Foundation

Floats though unseen among us; visiting This various world with as inconstant wing As summer winds that creep from flower to flower'''; Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower, It visits with inconstant glance Each human heart and countenance; Like hues and harmonies of evening, Like clouds in starlight widely spread, Like memory of music fled, Like aught that for its grace may be Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.
 * '''The awful shadow of some unseen Power
 * St. 1

With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon Of human thought or form, where art thou gone?''' Why dost thou pass away and leave our state, This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate? Ask why the sunlight not for ever Weaves rainbows o'er yon mountain-river, Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown, Why fear and dream and death and birth Cast on the daylight of this earth Such gloom, why man has such a scope For love and hate, despondency and hope?
 * '''Spirit of BEAUTY, that dost consecrate
 * St. 2

Or music by the night-wind sent Through strings of some still instrument, Or moonlight on a midnight stream, Gives grace and truth to life's unquiet dream.
 * Thy light alone like mist o'er mountains driven,
 * St. 3

To thee and thine: have I not kept the vow? With beating heart and streaming eyes, even now I call the phantoms of a thousand hours Each from his voiceless grave: they have in vision'd bowers Of studious zeal or love's delight Outwatch'd with me the envious night: They know that never joy illum'd my brow Unlink'd with hope that thou wouldst free This world from its dark slavery, That thou, O awful LOVELINESS, Wouldst give whate'er these words cannot express.
 * I vow'd that I would dedicate my powers
 * St. 6

When noon is past; there is a harmony In autumn, and a lustre in its sky, Which through the summer is not heard or seen''', As if it could not be, as if it had not been! '''Thus let thy power, which like the truth Of nature on my passive youth Descended, to my onward life supply Its calm, to one who worships thee, And every form containing thee, Whom, SPIRIT fair, thy spells did bind To fear himself, and love all human kind.'''
 * '''The day becomes more solemn and serene
 * St. 7

The Revolt of Islam (1817)
The shadow of a starless night, was thrown Over the world in which I moved alone.
 * Then black despair,
 * Dedication, st. 6

Over my frame he breathed, approaching near, And bent his eyes of kindling tenderness Near mine, and on my lips impressed a lingering kiss.
 * A wild dissolving bliss
 * Canto I, st. 42


 * Can man be free if woman be a slave?
 * Canto II, st. 43

His pencil in the gloom of earthquake and eclipse.'''
 * '''With hue like that when some great painter dips
 * Canto V, st. 23


 * Fear not the future, weep not for the past.
 * Canto XI, st. 18

Ozymandias (1818)
Who said: — '''Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand, Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies''', whose frown And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things, The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed. And on the pedestal these words appear: "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains: round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away.
 * I met a traveller from an antique land

Prometheus Unbound (1818–1819; publ. 1820)

 * Full text online

The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child, Met his own image walking in the garden. That apparition, sole of men, he saw.
 * Ere Babylon was dust,
 * Earth, Act I, l. 191

Grief for awhile is blind, and so was mine.
 * It doth repent me; words are quick and vain;
 * Prometheus, Act I, l. 304

The ravin it has gorged: the loftiest fear All that they would disdain to think were true: Hypocrisy and custom make their minds The fanes of many a worship, now outworn. They dare not devise good for man's estate, And yet they know not that they do not dare.
 * In each human heart terror survives
 * Fury, Act I, l. 618–624

The powerful goodness want: worse need for them. The wise want love; and those who love want wisdom; And all best things are thus confused to ill. Many are strong and rich, and would be just, But live among their suffering fellow-men As if none felt: they know not what they do.
 * The good want power, but to weep barren tears.
 * Fury, Act I, l. 625–631

And yet I pity those they torture not.
 * Thy words are like a cloud of winged snakes;
 * Prometheus, Act I, l. 632

The grave hides all things beautiful and good. I am a God and cannot find it there, Nor would I seek it; for, though dread revenge, This is defeat, fierce king, not victory.
 * Peace is in the grave.
 * Prometheus, Act I, l. 638


 * The dust of creeds outworn.
 * First Spirit, Act I, l. 697

Dreaming like a love-adept In the sound his breathing kept.
 * On a poet's lips I slept
 * Fourth Spirit, Act I, l. 737

The lake-reflected sun illume The yellow bees in the ivy-bloom, Nor heed nor see, what things they be; But from these create he can Forms more real than living man, Nurslings of immortality!
 * He will watch from dawn to gloom
 * Fourth Spirit, Act I, l. 742

Omnipotent but friendless, is to reign.
 * To know nor faith, nor love, nor law, to be
 * Asia, Act II, sc. iv, l. 47

Which is the measure of the universe.
 * He gave man speech, and speech created thought,
 * Asia, Act II, sc. iv, l. 72


 * All spirits are enslaved which serve things evil.
 * Demogorgon, Act II, sc. iv, l. 110

Given or returned. Common as light is love, And its familiar voice wearies not ever. Like the wide heaven, the all-sustaining air, It makes the reptile equal to the God; They who inspire it most are fortunate, As I am now; but those who feel it most Are happier still.
 * All love is sweet,
 * Asia, Act II, sc. v, l. 39

They sleep, and it is lifted.
 * Death is the veil which those who live call life;
 * Earth, Act III, sc. iii, l. 113

From chance, and death, and mutability, The clogs of that which else might oversoar The loftiest star of unascended heaven, Pinnacled dim in the intense inane.
 * Nor yet exempt, though ruling them like slaves,
 * Spirit of the Hour, Act III, sc. iv, l. 200

For the sun, their swift shepherd, To their folds them compelling, In the depths of the dawn, Hastes, in meteor-eclipsing array, and the flee Beyond his blue dwelling, As fawns flee the leopard.
 * The pale stars are gone!
 * Voice of Unseen Spirits, Act IV, l. 1


 * Familiar acts are beautiful through love.
 * The Earth, Act IV, l. 403


 * Soul meets soul on lovers' lips.
 * The Moon, Act IV, l. 451

A dupe and a deceiver! a decay, '''A traveller from the cradle to the grave Through the dim night of this immortal day.'''
 * Man, who wert once a despot and a slave,
 * Demogorgon, Act IV, l. 549

At the Earth-born's spell yawns for Heaven's despotism And Conquest is dragged captive through the deep: Love, from its awful throne of patient power In the wise heart, from the last giddy hour Of dread endurance, from the slippery, steep, And narrow verge of crag-like agony, springs And folds over the world its healing wings.
 * This is the day, which down the void abysm
 * Demogorgon, Act IV, l. 554–561

These are the seals of that most firm assurance Which bars the pit over Destruction's strength; And if, with infirm hand, Eternity, Mother of many acts and hours, should free The serpent that would clasp her with his length; These are the spells by which to reassume An empire o'er the disentangled doom.
 * Gentleness, Virtue, Wisdom, and Endurance,
 * Demogorgon, Act IV, l. 562–569

To forgive wrongs darker than Death or Night; To defy Power, which seems Omnipotent; To love, and bear; to hope, till Hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates; Neither to change nor falter nor repent; This, like thy glory, Titan! is to be Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free; This is alone Life; Joy, Empire, and Victory!
 * To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
 * Demogorgon, Act IV, closing lines

Julian and Maddalo (1819)
And solitary places; where we taste The pleasure of believing what we see Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be.
 * I love all waste
 * l. 14

That thus enchains us to permitted ill. We might be otherwise, we might be all We dream of happy, high, majestical. Where is the love, beauty and truth we seek, But in our mind? and if we were not weak, Should we be less in deed than in desire?
 * It is our will
 * l. 170

The else unfelt oppressions of this earth, And was to thee the flame upon thy hearth, When all beside was cold: — that thou on me Shouldst rain these plagues of blistering agony!
 * Me — who am as a nerve o'er which do creep
 * l. 449

The work of their own hearts, and this must be Our chastisement or recompense.
 * Those who inflict must suffer, for they see
 * l. 482

Are cradled into poetry by wrong; They learn in suffering what they teach in song.
 * Most wretched men
 * l. 543

Ode to the West Wind (1819)


Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing, Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, Pestilence-stricken multitudes''': O thou, Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low, Each like a corpse within its grave, until Thine azure sister of the spring shall blow Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth.
 * '''O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,
 * St. I

Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh, hear!
 * Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
 * St. I

Of the dying year, to which this closing night Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre, Vaulted with all thy congregated might.
 * Thou dirge
 * St. II

The blue Mediterranean, where he lay, Lull'd by the coil of his crystalline streams Beside a pumice isle in Baiæ's bay, And saw in sleep old palaces and towers Quivering within the wave's intenser day, All overgrown with azure moss and flowers So sweet, the sense faints picturing them.
 * Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams
 * St. III

I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!'''
 * '''Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
 * St. IV

What if my leaves are falling like its own?''' The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
 * '''Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:

Will take from both a deep autumnal tone, Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce, My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe, Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth! And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguish'd hearth Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! '''Be through my lips to unawaken'd earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind, If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?'''
 * St. V

(1819)

 * Full text online

There came a voice from over the Sea, And with great power it forth led me To walk in the visions of Poesy.
 * As I lay asleep in Italy
 * St. 1

He had a mask like Castlereagh''' — Very smooth he looked, yet grim; Seven blood-hounds followed him.
 * '''I met Murder on the way —
 * St. 2

Be in admirable plight, For one by one, and two by two, He tossed them human hearts to chew.
 * All were fat; and well they might
 * St. 3

In this ghastly masquerade, All disguised, even to the eyes, Like Bishops, lawyers, peers, or spies.
 * And many more Destructions played
 * St. 7

On a white horse, splashed with blood; He was pale even to the lips, Like Death in the Apocalypse.
 * Last came Anarchy: he rode
 * St. 8

And in his grasp a sceptre shone; On his brow this mark I saw — 'I AM GOD, AND KING, AND LAW!'
 * And he wore a kingly crown;
 * St. 9

Rode through England proud and gay, Drunk as with intoxication Of the wine of desolation.
 * And with glorious triumph, they
 * St. 12

With waiting for a better day; See how idiot-like he stands, Fumbling with his palsied hands!
 * My father Time is weak and gray
 * St. 23

That which slavery is, too well — For its very name has grown To an echo of your own.
 * What is Freedom? — ye can tell
 * St. 39

May thy righteous laws be sold As laws are in England — thou Shield'st alike the high and low.
 * Thou art Justice — ne'er for gold
 * St. 57

Was poured forth, even as a flood? It availed, Oh, Liberty, To dim, but not extinguish thee.
 * What if English toil and blood
 * St. 60

All that can adorn and bless Art thou — let deeds, not words, express Thine exceeding loveliness.
 * Spirit, Patience, Gentleness,
 * St. 64

The green earth on which ye tread, All that must eternal be Witness the solemnity.
 * Let the blue sky overhead,
 * St. 66

Where is waged the daily strife With common wants and common cares Which sows the human heart with tares.
 * From the haunts of daily life
 * St. 69

Keen to wound as sharpened swords, And wide as targes let them be, With their shade to cover ye.
 * Be your strong and simple words
 * St. 74

Like a forest close and mute, With folded arms and looks which are Weapons of unvanquished war.
 * Stand ye calm and resolute,
 * St. 79

Whose reverend heads with age are gray, Children of a wiser day; And whose solemn voice must be Thine own echo — Liberty!
 * The old laws of England — they
 * St. 82

In unvanquishable number — Shake your chains to earth like dew Which in sleep had fallen on you — Ye are many — they are few.
 * Rise like Lions after slumber
 * St. 91

The Cloud (1820)

 * Full text online



From the seas and the streams; I bear light shade for the leaves when laid In their noonday dreams. From my wings are shaken the dews that waken The sweet buds every one, When rocked to rest on their mother's breast, As she dances about the sun. I wield the flail of the lashing hail, And whiten the green plains under, And then again I dissolve it in rain, And laugh as I pass in thunder.
 * I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers,
 * St. 1

And the nursling of the Sky; I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores; I change, but I cannot die.'''
 * '''I am the daughter of Earth and Water,
 * St. 7

The pavilion of Heaven is bare, And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams Build up the blue dome of air, '''I silently laugh at my own cenotaph, And out of the caverns of rain, Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb, I arise and unbuild it again.'''
 * For after the rain when with never a stain
 * St. 7 (a cenotaph is an empty tomb or a monument erected in honor of a person who is buried elsewhere)

To a Skylark (1821)

 * Full text online at Wikisource



Bird thou never wert, That from Heaven, or near it, Pourest thy full heart In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.'''
 * '''Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!
 * St. 1

From the earth thou springest, Like a cloud of fire; The blue deep thou wingest, And singing still dost soar and soaring ever singest.
 * Higher still and higher
 * St. 2


 * Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.
 * St. 3


 * Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight.
 * St. 4

And pine for what is not: Our sincerest laughter With some pain is fraught; Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.'''
 * '''We look before and after,
 * St. 18

That thy brain must know, Such harmonious madness From my lips would flow The world should listen then — as I am listening now.'''
 * '''Teach me half the gladness
 * St. 21

Hellas (1821)

 * We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts have their root in Greece.
 * Preface

Hope may vanish, but can die not; Truth be veiled, but still it burneth; Love repulsed, — but it returneth!
 * Life may change, but it may fly not;
 * l. 34

The worship of the world, but no repose.
 * Kings are like stars — they rise and set, they have
 * l. 195

Arose, and it shall set; While, blazoned as on heaven's immortal noon, The cross leads generations on.
 * The moon of Mahomet
 * l. 221

And like sunrise from the sea, Athens arose!
 * Let there be light! said Liberty,
 * l. 682

Built below the tide of war, Based on the crystalline sea Of thought and its eternity; Her citizens, imperial spirits, Rule the present from the past, On all this world of men inherits Their seal is set.
 * But Greece and her foundations are
 * l. 696-703

The golden years return, The earth doth like a snake renew Her winter weeds outworn; Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam, Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.'''
 * '''The world's great age begins anew,
 * l. 1060

Oh, might it die or rest at last!'''
 * '''The world is weary of the past,
 * Final chorus

Epipsychidion (1821)
Who fitly shalt conceive thy reasoning, Of such hard matter dost thou entertain; Whence, if by misadventure, chance should bring Thee to base company (as chance may do), Quite unaware of what thou dost contain, I prithee, comfort thy sweet self again, My last delight! tell them that they are dull, And bid them own that thou art beautiful.
 * My Song, I fear that thou wilt find but few
 * Dedication

Pourest such music, that it might assuage The rugged hearts of those who prisoned thee, Were they not deaf to all sweet melody.
 * Poor captive bird! Who, from thy narrow cage,
 * l. 9

Youth's vision thus made perfect.
 * I never thought before my death to see
 * l. 41

Beacon the rocks on which high hearts are wreckt. '''I never was attached to that great sect, Whose doctrine is, that each one should select Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend, And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend To cold oblivion''', though it is in the code Of modern morals, and the beaten road Which those poor slaves with weary footsteps tread, Who travel to their home among the dead By the broad highway of the world, and so With one chained friend, — perhaps a jealous foe, The dreariest and the longest journey go.
 * Thy wisdom speaks in me, and bids me dare
 * l. 147

That to divide is not to take away. Love is like understanding, that grows bright, Gazing on many truths; 'tis like thy light, Imagination! which from earth and sky, And from the depths of human phantasy, As from a thousand prisms and mirrors, fills The Universe with glorious beams, and kills Error, the worm, with many a sun-like arrow Of its reverberated lightning.
 * True Love in this differs from gold and clay,

Evil from good; misery from happiness; The baser from the nobler; the impure And frail, from what is clear and must endure. If you divide suffering and dross, you may Diminish till it is consumed away; If you divide pleasure and love and thought, Each part exceeds the whole; and we know not How much, while any yet remains unshared, Of pleasure may be gained, of sorrow spared: This truth is that deep well, whence sages draw The unenvied light of hope; the eternal law By which those live, to whom this world of life Is as a garden ravaged, and whose strife Tills for the promise of a later birth The wilderness of this Elysian earth.
 * Mind from its object differs most in this:
 * l. 174

But its reward is in the world divine Which, if not here, it builds beyond the grave.
 * Love's very pain is sweet,
 * l. 595

And leave the troop which errs, and which reproves, And come and be my guest, — for I am Love's.
 * And bid them love each other and be blest:
 * l. 602

Adonais (1821)

 * The cemetery is an open space among the ruins covered in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place.
 * Preface

O, weep for Adonais! though our tears Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head!
 * I weep for Adonais — he is dead!
 * St. I

Forget the Past, his fate and fame shall be An echo and a light unto eternity!
 * Till the Future dares
 * St. I


 * Most musical of mourners, weep again!
 * St. IV

Who was the Sire of an immortal strain, Blind, old, and lonely.
 * He died,
 * St. IV

Keeps his pale court in beauty and decay, He came.'''
 * '''To that high Capital, where kingly Death
 * St. VI

The passion-winged Ministers of thought.
 * The quick Dreams,
 * St. IX

She knew not 'twas her own; as with no stain She faded, like a cloud which had outwept its rain.
 * Lost Angel of a ruined Paradise!
 * St. X

Winged Persuasions and veiled Destinies, Splendours, and GloOms, and glimmering Incarnations Of hopes and fears, and twilight Phantasies; And Sorrow, with her family of Sighs, And Pleasure, blind with tears, led by the gleam Of her own dying smile instead of eyes, Came in slow pomp; — the moving pomp might seem Like pageantry of mist on an autumnal stream.
 * And others came... Desires and Adorations,
 * St. XIII

But grief returns with the revolving year.'''
 * Ah, woe is me! '''Winter is come and gone,
 * St. XVIII

God dawned on Chaos.'''
 * '''From the great morning of the world when first
 * St. XIX

A moment, then is quenched in a most cold repose.
 * The intense atom glows
 * St. XX

But for our grief, as if it had not been, And grief itself be mortal! Woe is me! Whence are we, and why are we? of what scene The actors or spectators?
 * Alas! that all we loved of him should be,
 * St. XXI

Evening must usher night, night urge the morrow, Month follow month with woe, and year wake year to sorrow.
 * As long as skies are blue, and fields are green,
 * St. XXI

Over his living head like Heaven is bent, An early but enduring monument, Came, veiling all the lightnings of his song In sorrow.
 * The Pilgrim of Eternity, whose fame
 * St. XXX

A Love in desolation masked; — a Power Girt round with weakness; — it can scarce uplift The weight of the superincumbent hour; It is a dying lamp, a falling shower, A breaking billow; — even whilst we speak Is it not broken? On the withering flower The killing sun smiles brightly: on a cheek The life can burn in blood, even while the heart may break.
 * A pardlike Spirit beautiful and swift —
 * St. XXXII

Athwart what brow is that dark mantle thrown? What form leans sadly o'er the white death — bed, In mockery of monumental stone, The heavy heart heaving without a moan?
 * What softer voice is hushed over the dead?
 * St. XXXV

Thou canst not soar where he is sitting now - '''Dust to the dust! but the pure spirit shall flow Back to the burning fountain whence it came, A portion of the Eternal.'''
 * He wakes or sleeps with the enduring dead;
 * St. XXXVIII

'''He hath awakened from the dream of life— 'Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep With phantoms an unprofitable strife, And in mad trance, strike with our spirit's knife Invulnerable nothings.'''
 * Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep—
 * St. XXXIX

Envy and calumny and hate and pain, And that unrest which men miscall delight, Can touch him not and torture not again; '''From the contagion of the world's slow stain He is secure, and now can never mourn A heart grown cold, a head grown grey in vain.'''
 * He has outsoared the shadow of our night;
 * St. XL

Mourn not for Adonais. — Thou young Dawn, Turn all thy dew to splendour, for from thee The spirit thou lamentest is not gone.
 * He lives, he wakes — 'tis Death is dead, not he;
 * St. XLI

His voice in all her music, from the moan Of thunder, to the song of night's sweet bird.
 * He is made one with Nature: there is heard
 * St. XLII

Which once he made more lovely.'''
 * '''He is a portion of the loveliness
 * St. XLIII

Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly; '''Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of Eternity, Until Death tramples it to fragments.'''
 * The One remains, the many change and pass;
 * St. LII

Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.
 * The soul of Adonais, like a star,
 * St. LV

Song: Rarely, Rarely, Comest Thou (1821)
Spirit of Delight! Wherefore hast thou left me now Many a day and night? Many a weary night and day 'Tis since thou are fled away.
 * Rarely, rarely, comest thou,
 * St. 1

To a merry measure; Thou wilt never come for pity, Thou wilt come for pleasure; Pity then will cut away Those cruel wings, and thou wilt stay.
 * Let me set my mournful ditty
 * St. 4

And such society As is quiet, wise, and good; Between thee and me What difference? but thou dost possess The things I seek, not love them less.
 * I love tranquil solitude,
 * St. 7

And like light can flee, But above all other things, Spirit, I love thee — Thou art love and life! Oh come, Make once more my heart thy home.
 * I love Love — though he has wings,
 * St. 8

A Defence of Poetry (1821)

 * Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things.


 * The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself.


 * Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.


 * Revenge is the naked idol of the worship of a semi-barbarous age.


 * Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.


 * Tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain.


 * Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.


 * A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds. His auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician.


 * The life of Camillus, the death of Regulus; the expectation of the senators, in their godlike state, of the victorious Gauls; the refusal of the republic to make peace with Hannibal, after the battle of Cannae, were not the consequences of a refined calculation of the probable personal advantage to result from such a rhythm and order in the shows of life, to those who were at once the poets and the actors of these immortal dramas. The imagination beholding the beauty of this order, created it out of itself according to its own idea; the consequence was empire, and the reward everlasting fame. These things are not the less poetry, quia carent vate sacro [because they lack a sacred bard]. They are the episodes of that cyclic poem written by Time upon the memories of men.
 * This passage has sometimes been paraphrased as "History is a cyclic poem written by Time upon the memories of man".


 * Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

To Jane: The Invitation (1822)

 * Best and brightest, come away!
 * l. 1

Strewed flowers upon the barren way, Making the wintry world appear Like one on whom thou smilest, dear.
 * And like a prophetess of May
 * l. 17

To the wild wood and the downs — To the silent wilderness Where the soul need not repress Its music lest it should not find An echo in another's mind.
 * Away, away, from men and towns,
 * l. 21

To take what this sweet hour yields; — Reflection, you may come to-morrow, Sit by the fireside with Sorrow. — You with the unpaid bill, Despair, — You, tiresome verse-reciter, Care, — I will pay you in the grave, — Death will listen to your stave.
 * I am gone into the fields
 * l. 31

The Triumph of Life (1822)
Mitres and helms and crowns, or wreaths of light, Signs of thought's empire over thought —their lore Taught them not this, to know themselves; their might Could not repress the mystery within.
 * ... they who wore

Good and the means of good.
 * ... why God made irreconcilable


 * Then, what is Life?

Misattributed

 * Change is certain. Peace is followed by disturbances; departure of evil men by their return. Such recurrences should not constitute occasions for sadness but realities for awareness, so that one may be happy in the interim.
 * Not Shelley but the I Ching


 * The more we study, we the more discover / Our ignorance.
 * Calderón, “Scenes from the Magico Prodigioso” fourth speech of Cyprian, as translated by Shelley, found in The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Scott, William B, ed.

Quotes about Shelley

 * poetry, as Percy Shelley observed, is like a great river into which thousands of tributaries flow.
 * Claribel Alegría speech (2006) Translation from the Spanish by David Draper Clark


 * The other people that I was simply made for were the Romantic poets. Shelley, in particular, and Keats.
 * Paula Gunn Allen Interview in Survival This Way: Interviews with American Indian Poets by Joseph Bruchac (1987)


 * After dinner Mr. Mill read us Shelley's Ode to Liberty & he got quite excited & moved over it rocking backwards & forwards & nearly choking with emotion; he said himself: “it is almost too much for one.”
 * Lord Amberley, journal entry (28 September 1870), quoted in Bertrand and Patricia Russell (eds.), The Amberley Papers, Volume II (1937), p. 375


 * Lucretius and his tradition taught Shelley that freedom came from understanding causation.
 * Harold Bloom, The Anatomy of Influence (2011), p. 142


 * Shelley, who in Prometheus Unbound had observed that the wise lack love and those who have love lack wisdom, went to his end in The Triumph of Life asking why good and the means of good were irreconcilable.
 * Harold Bloom, The Anatomy of Influence (2011), p. 142


 * Poor soul, he has always seemed to me an extremely weak creature, and lamentable much more than admirable. Weak in genius, weak in character (for these two always go together); a poor thin, spasmodic, hectic, shrill and pallid being; -- one of those unfortunates, of whom I often speak, to whom the 'talent of silence', first of all, has been denied. The speech of such is never good for much. Poor Shelley, there is something void and Hades-like in the whole inner-world of him; his universe is all vacant azure, hung with a few frosty mournful if beautiful stars; the very voice of him (his style &c), shrill, shrieky, to my ear has too much of the ghost!
 * Thomas Carlyle, letter to Robert Browning (8 March 1852), in The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, ed. C. de L. Ryals and K.J. Fielding (1999)


 * The ideas of Shelley seem to me always to be ideas of adolescence—as there is every reason why they should be. And an enthusiasm for Shelley seems to me also to be an affair of adolescence: for most of us, Shelley has marked an intense period before maturity, but for how many does Shelley remain the companion of age? I confess that I never open the volume of his poems simply because I want to read poetry, but only with some special reason for reference. I find his ideas repellent; and the difficulty of separating Shelley from his ideas and beliefs is still greater than with Wordsworth. And the biographical interest which Shelley has always excited makes it difficult to read the poetry without remembering the man: and the man was humourless, pedantic, self-centred, and sometimes almost a blackguard.
 * T. S. Eliot, 'Shelley and Keats' (17 February 1933), The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the Relation of Criticism to Poetry in England (1933), p. 89


 * At last, at the age of 17 I came across Shelley, whom no one had ever told me about. He remained for many years the man I loved most among the great men of the past.
 * Paul Foot, Red Shelley (1980)


 * Emotional sorrow has inspired many sublime lyrics, much profound insight and poetic exultation of a Byron, Shelley, Heine, and their kind.
 * Emma Goldman "Jealousy: Causes and a Possible Cure" (1910)


 * In a few minutes Shelley opened the conversation by saying in the most feminine and gentle voice, "As to that detestable religion, the Christian——" I looked astounded, but casting a glance round the table easily saw by ——'s expression of ecstasy and the women's simper, I was to be set at that evening vi et armis. No reply, however, was made to this sally during dinner, but when the dessert came and the servant was gone to it we went like fiends. —— and —— were deists. I felt exactly like a stag at bay and resolved to gore without mercy. Shelley said the Mosaic and Christian dispensations were inconsistent. I swore they were not, and that the Ten Commandments had been the foundation of all the codes of law in the earth. Shelley denied it.
 * Benjamin Haydon, Life of Benjamin Robert Haydon, Historical Painter, From His Autobiography and Journals, Vol. I (1853), pp. 362-363


 * The author of the Prometheus Unbound...has a fire in his eye, a fever in his blood, a maggot in his brain, a hectic flutter in his speech, which mark out the philosophic fanatic. He is sanguine-complexioned, and shrill-voiced. As is often observable in the case of religious enthusiasts, there is a slenderness of constitutional stamina, which renders the flesh no match for the spirit. His bending, flexible form appears to take no strong hold of things, does not grapple with the world about him, but slides from it like a river.
 * William Hazlitt, 'Essay XV. On Paradox and Common-Place', Table-Talk; Or, Original Essays (1821), pp. 354-355


 * He rose early in the morning, walked and read before breakfast, took that meal sparingly, wrote and studied the greater part of the morning, walked and read again, dined on vegetables (for he took neither meat nor wine) conversed with his friends (to whom his house was ever open), again walked out, and usually finished with reading to his wife till ten o'clock, when he went to bed. This was his daily existence. His book was generally Plato, or Homer, or one of the Greek tragedies, or the Bible, in which last he took a great, though peculiar, and often admiring interest.
 * Leigh Hunt, Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries, Vol. I, 2nd edition (1828), 'Mr. Shelley', p. 323


 * Shelley I saw once. His voice was the most obnoxious squeak I ever was tormented with, ten thousand times worse than the Laureat's, who voice is the worst part about him, except his Laureatship.
 * Charles Lamb, letter to Bernard Barton (9 October 1822), in The Life, Letters and Writings of Charles Lamb (1897)


 * Shelley was not gifted for drama or narrative. Having said this, I realize that I had forgotten the conventional standing of The Cenci; but controversy may be postponed: it is at any rate universally agreed that (to shift tactfully to positive terms) Shelley's genius was "essentially lyrical".
 * F. R. Leavis, Revaluation: Tradition & Development in English Poetry (1936; 1964), pp. 172-173


 * The things we liked most of course were the things that more or less selected or symbolized our own feelings of conditions and life in general...Later, we found "The Masque of Anarchy" by Shelley, and of course in addition to that there were the Jewish poets, like Rosenfeld and Edelshtat.
 * Pauline Newman, Interview (1965) in Jewish Radicals: A Documentary Reader


 * Most of the great critics of English poetry have also been poets: Sir Philip Sidney, Samuel Johnson, Coleridge, Shelley, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound, to name a few.
 * Alicia Ostriker Interview


 * Shelley appealed to me from his hatred of tyranny. And also from his very vivid sense of beauty, natural beauty, and every kind of beauty. And I thought he sort of portrayed a lovely world of the imagination.
 * Bertrand Russell, Interview with David Susskind (10 June 1962)


 * Shelley, whose talents would otherwise have made him eligible, was an outcast from the first ... They always knew where to draw the line and they drew it, emphatically, at Shelley. I was informed that Byron could be forgiven because, though he had sinned, he had been led into sin by the unfortunate circumstances of his youth, and had always been haunted by remorse, but that for Shelley's moral character there was nothing to be said since he acted on principle and therefore he could not be worth reading.
 * Bertrand Russell, Legitimacy versus industrialism, 1814-1848, Unwin, 1965


 * I regard Shelley's early 'atheism' and later Pantheism, as simply the negative and the affirmative side of the same progressive but harmonious life-creed. In his earlier years his disposition was towards a vehement denial of a theology which he never ceased to detest; in his maturer years he made more frequent reference to the great World Spirit in whom he had from the first believed. He grew wiser in the exercise of his religious faith, but the faith was the same throughout; there, was progression, but no essential change.
 * Henry Stephens Salt, Percy Bysshe shelley, Poet and Pioneer (1913)


 * Shelley resembled Blake in the contrast of feeling with which he regarded the Christian religion and its founder. For the human character of Christ he could feel the deepest veneration, as may be seen not only from the "Essay on Christianity," but from the "Letter to Lord Ellenborough" (1812), and also from the notes to "Hellas" and passages in that poem and in "Prometheus Unbound"; but he held that the spirit of established Christianity was wholly out of harmony with that of Christ, and that a similarity to Christ was one of the qualities most detested by the modern Christian. The dogmas of the Christian faith were always repudiated by him, and there is no warrant whatever in his writings for the strange pretension that, had he lived longer, his objections to Christianity might in some way have been overcome.
 * Henry Stephens Salt, Foreword to a 1913 publication of "The Necessity of Atheism"


 * The radical foulness of moral complexion, characterizing such compositions as this one now before us, we shall never let escape unnoticed or unexposed. It is at once disgusting and dangerous; our duty, therefore, is here in unison with our taste. In The Cenci, however, the fault in question is almost redeemed, so far as literary merit is concerned, by uncommon force of poetical sentiment, and very considerable purity of poetical style.
 * John Scott, 'The Cenci, a Tragedy', The London Magazine, Vol. I (May 1820), p. 551


 * I was a cannibal for twenty-five years. For the rest I have been a vegetarian. It was Shelley who first opened my eyes to the savagery of my diet.
 * George Bernard Shaw, interview in Frank Harris's The Candid Friend (May 1901), reprinted in Sixteen Self Sketches, 1949, p. 53; quoted in Desmond King-Hele, Shelley: His Thought and Work, 1984, p. 42


 * I think it was the Saturday after my illness, while yet unable to walk, I was confined to my bed—in the middle of the night I was awoke by hearing him scream and come rushing into my room... He dreamt that, lying as he did in bed, Edward and Jane came in to him; they were in the most horrible condition; their bodies lacerated, their bones starting through their skin, their faces pale yet stained with blood; they could hardly walk, but Edward was the weakest, and Jane was supporting him. Edward said, "Get up, Shelley, the sea is flooding the house, and it is all coming down." Shelley got up, he thought, and went to his window that looked on the terrace and the sea, and thought he saw the sea rushing in. Suddenly his vision changed, and he saw the figure of himself strangling me; that had made him rush into my room, yet, fearful of frightening me, he dared not approach the bed, when my jumping out awoke him, or, as he phrased it, caused his vision to vanish. All this was frightful enough, and talking it over the next morning, he told me that he had had many visions lately; he had seen the figure of himself, which met him as he walked on the terrace and said to him, "How long do you mean to be content?"
 * Mary Shelley to Mrs. Gisborne (15 August 1822), quoted in Mrs. Julian Marshall, The Life & Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Vol. II (1889), p. 13


 * In a short time Shelley was announced, and I beheld a fair, freckled, blue-eyed, light-haired, delicate-looking person, whose countenance was serious and thoughtful; whose stature would have been rather tall had he carried himself upright; whose earnest voice, though never loud, was somewhat unmusical. Manifest as it was that his pre-occupied mind had no thought to spare for the modish adjustment of his fashionably-made clothes, it was impossible to doubt, even for a moment, that you were gazing upon a gentleman; a first impression which subsequent observation never failed to confirm, even in the most exalted acceptation of the term, as indicating one that is gentle, generous, accomplished, brave.
 * Horace Smith on his meeting with Shelley in 1816, quoted in Arthur H. Beavan, James and Horace Smith, Joint Authors of 'Rejected Addresses', A Family Narrative Based Upon Hitherto Unpublished Private Diaries, Letters, and Other Documents (1899), p. 137


 * The face and hands, and parts of the body not protected by the dress, were fleshless. The tall slight figure, the jacket, the volume of Sophocles in one pocket, and Keats's poems in the other, doubled back, as if the reader, in the act of reading, had hastily thrust it away, were all too familiar to me to leave a doubt on my mind that this mutilated corpse was any other than Shelley's.
 * Edward John Trelawny, Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron (1858), p. 120


 * On 8 July 1822, Percy Bysshe Shelley, radical and one of the great English Romantic poets died aged just 29 when his boat sank. While not famous during his lifetime, he achieved great recognition following his death. The poem he penned following the Peterloo massacre, "The masque of anarchy" is one of his most powerful: "Rise like Lions after slumber/In unvanquishable number—/Shake your chains to earth like dew/Which in sleep had fallen on you—/Ye are many—they are few."
 * Working Class History (2020)