Wednesday, 8 July 2015
Mini History Blogs The Death of Percy Bysshe Shelley
On this day in 1822 and only a month before his 30th birthday, Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned when his boat overturned during a storm. He was returning from visiting his friends Lord Byron and James Leigh Hunt. Shelley was cremated and his ashes placed in a cemetery in Rome. Of Shelley's life it has been written:
"The life and works of Percy Bysshe Shelley exemplify Romanticism in both its extremes of joyous ecstasy and brooding despair. The major themes are there in Shelley’s dramatic if short life and in his works, enigmatic, inspiring, and lasting: the restlessness and brooding, the rebellion against authority, the interchange with nature, the power of the visionary imagination and of poetry, the pursuit of ideal love, and the untamed spirit ever in search of freedom—all of these Shelley exemplified in the way he lived his life and on in the substantial body of work that he left the world after his legendary death at age twenty-nine."