Percy Bysshe Shelley

This biography, incorporating recent research and scholarship, stresses the intimate relationship between Shelley's life (1792-1822) and his poetry. Unusual aristocratic family influences, a unique and precocious childhood, traumatic educational events, and parental rejection molded the concurrent development of his radical sociopolitical beliefs and his poetic identity. Political activism (Ireland and Wales) prefigured the disastrous dissolution of Shelley's first marriage, replaced by involvement with William Godwin and elopement with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. After losing legal custody of his two children by his first wife because of his radical writing and behavior, increasing social ostracism, health concerns, and critical attacks on his poetry led to exile in Italy. Here, before his untimely death, he composed his greatest lyrics and most profound poetry amid personal anguish involving the deaths of his and Mary's children, Keats's death, romantic intrigues, marital disaffection, disillusionment with Byron, and political turbulence at home and abroad. Illustrated, Now retired, Dr. Bieri taught at the University of Texas at Austin.