50 Fun Facts About Percy Bysshe Shelley

In which year was Percy Bysshe Shelley born?

He was born at Field Place in Warnham, Sussex, the eldest son of a baronet's heir who sat in Parliament.

How old was Shelley when he died?

He drowned in a boating accident in 1822, having produced most of his best work in four years of Italian exile.

Shelley's second wife wrote which famous novel?

Mary Shelley conceived the story during a wet Swiss summer with Byron in 1816.

Shelley wrote Ozymandias in a friendly sonnet competition with which banker and writer?

Smith's own sonnet on the same subject was published a few weeks after Shelley's.

Ozymandias is the Greek name for which Egyptian pharaoh?

Shelley began the poem in anticipation of a huge fragment of a Ramesses statue arriving in Britain.

Under what pen name was Ozymandias first published in The Examiner in 1818?

The name means lover of dormice; Dormouse was his pet name for Mary.

Which ancient historian's description of a colossal statue inspired the Ozymandias sonnets?

The historian quoted the inscription: King of Kings Ozymandias am I.

Which statue fragment, headed for the British Museum, prompted Shelley to write Ozymandias?

The seven-ton head-and-torso fragment came from the Ramesseum and did not reach London until 1821.

From which university was Shelley expelled in 1811?

He refused to answer questions about whether he had written an atheist pamphlet.

What was the title of the pamphlet that got Shelley expelled?

He mailed copies to all the bishops and heads of colleges.

Which university friend co-wrote the atheism pamphlet and was expelled alongside Shelley?

Hogg later tried to seduce Shelley's first wife while the poet was away.

Which school did Shelley later recall with loathing, where bullies staged 'Shelley-baits'?

He gave a master an electric shock and blew up a tree stump with gunpowder there.

What nickname did the young poet's schoolmates at the boarding school he loathed give him?

His peculiarities and violent rages earned it, and he tried to raise spirits with occult rituals.

What was the name of Shelley's first wife, whom he eloped with to Scotland in 1811?

She was sixteen and a pupil at the same boarding school as his sisters.

Where was Shelley married to his first wife?

Both fathers cut off their allowances when they heard of the elopement.

Shelley's father sat in Parliament for which party?

Sir Timothy Shelley was MP for Horsham and later Shoreham.

Who was the mother of Shelley's second wife, a pioneering feminist writer?

Shelley and Mary declared their love at her grave in St Pancras churchyard.

Where did Shelley and Mary Godwin declare their love for each other in June 1814?

Godwin banished Shelley from the house when he announced he would leave Harriet.

Which of Mary's step-sisters went along when Shelley and Mary eloped to Europe in 1814?

She later began an affair with Byron and bore his daughter Allegra.

Shelley's radical mentor, whose daughter he ran off with, wrote which work?

William Godwin had softened his views by the time Shelley wrote to him offering himself as a disciple.

Beside which lake did Shelley and Byron spend the famous summer of 1816?

A boating tour of the lake inspired Hymn to Intellectual Beauty.

What was Byron reciting when Shelley suffered a panic attack with hallucinations at Villa Diodati?

The previous night Mary had had the nightmare that inspired her famous novel.

Which mountain gave its name to a Shelley poem written after a tour of Chamonix?

He signed guest books on the tour with a declaration that he was an atheist.

How did Shelley's first wife die in December 1816?

Pregnant and living alone, she believed her new lover had abandoned her.

Which legal body denied Shelley custody of his children by Harriet?

The judges cited his abandonment of his wife and his atheism.

What was Shelley's 1813 utopian poem, later a 'bible' for the Chartists?

Its notes preached atheism, free love and republicanism, and pirated editions spread it among the working classes.

How many copies of his 1813 utopian poem did Shelley print in the private first edition?

Only around 70 sets were bound and given to friends; the rest sat in a London bookshop until they were pirated.

In Shelley's 1813 fairy-tale poem, whose sleeping spirit does the fairy queen carry off on a tour of the universe?

Shelley later gave the same name to his first daughter.

Which 1819 event in Manchester prompted Shelley to write The Mask of Anarchy?

He finished the poem within two weeks of hearing the news in Livorno.

In what year was The Mask of Anarchy finally published, a decade after Shelley's death?

Leigh Hunt had withheld it from The Examiner for fear of a seditious libel prosecution.

Which line from The Mask of Anarchy inspired the slogan of the 1989-90 UK poll tax protests?

The poem was also recited by students in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Ode to the West Wind was written in 1819 in a wood near which Italian city?

He wrote it in the Cascine wood, and it appeared in the 1820 Prometheus Unbound volume.

Ode to the West Wind is written in which interlocking rhyme scheme?

Each of its five sections has four tercets and a closing couplet, in iambic pentameter.

Which Greek dramatist's lost play inspired Shelley's Prometheus Unbound?

Unlike the Greek original, Shelley refused any reconciliation between Prometheus and Jupiter.

How many acts does Prometheus Unbound have?

Its subtitle calls it a lyrical drama, and it was published in 1820.

In Prometheus Unbound, which Oceanid is Prometheus's beloved?

Panthea and Ione are the two Oceanides who keep watch beside the bound Titan.

Which Shelley work was the only one to reach two authorised editions in his lifetime?

The verse drama tells the story of the Renaissance Count Cenci and his daughter Beatrice.

Adonais is Shelley's elegy on the death of which poet?

Shelley wrongly claimed in the preface that harsh reviews had caused the death.

Adonais is written in what stanza form?

It runs to 495 lines in 55 stanzas, following the tradition of Milton's Lycidas.

Which friend cared for the dying poet in Rome and was thanked by Shelley in the preface to Adonais?

The praise increased interest in Severn's work as a painter.

Which prose essay by Shelley ends by calling poets 'the unacknowledged legislators of the world'?

It answered Peacock's essay The Four Ages of Poetry and went unpublished in his lifetime.

What was the name of the boat in which Shelley drowned in July 1822?

It was an open boat custom-built for him in Genoa and lost in a storm off Livorno.

A copy of which Keats poem in his jacket pocket helped identify Shelley's body?

The badly decomposed body washed ashore at Viareggio ten days after the sinking.

What happened to Shelley's body on a beach near Viareggio on 16 August 1822?

His ashes were then interred in the Protestant Cemetery of Rome.

Which organ, said to have resisted the flames of Shelley's cremation, did Trelawny snatch from the pyre?

It may actually have been his liver, and Leigh Hunt kept it in spirits of wine before Mary got it.

What Latin inscription, meaning Heart of Hearts, appears on Shelley's grave in Rome?

The grave also quotes Ariel's Song from The Tempest about suffering a sea change.

Which Victorian critic dismissed Shelley as a 'beautiful and ineffectual angel'?

Twentieth-century critics like Eliot and Leavis were harsher still before his reputation revived in the 1960s.

Shelley's advocacy of which diet inspired the founding of the Vegetarian Society in 1847?

He wrote A Vindication of Natural Diet in 1813 and influenced George Bernard Shaw.

Which Tory newspaper wrote on Shelley's death: 'now he knows whether there is God or no'?

It called him the writer of some infidel poetry.

Which of Shelley's children survived him and became the third baronet in 1844?

He was born in the Tuscan capital in November 1819, hence the middle name.