n August 4, 1792, the Reign of Terror was unleashed in France, the same day Percy Bysshe Shelley, the writer of poetry, letters, pamphlets and discursive prose was born. He grew up in a conservative literary milieu of Regency England and produced poetry and polemical writings disputing the political/ social tenor of his times. The Defense of Poetry (1811) is a testimony to poetry’s supremacy and of Shelley’s whose bicentennial is being celebrated by votaries of European Romanticism. In this essay Shelley, an advocate of amour libre, and a champion of Promethean resistance, dwells upon the ironic fate of a poet; “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” The poet juxtaposes the man-made laws of parliament with the eternal laws of poetry. Both ambitious and affable, the poet processes “Poetry […] a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.” The mimetic function of art, a hallowed activity, is at the heart of Shelley’s manifesto. In other words, he is in pursuit of an Elysium where there will be no rules, and yet poetry will rule.

His imagination is revolutionary, of an egalitarian magnitude, but with a reformative bend, unhinged by reason. Therefore, for Shelley, poetry induces political change. With the exception of John Keats, all romantic poets envisioned change through political upheaval. Shelley envisaged poetry’s utilitarian function, an idea broached with the political philosopher, William Godwin – with whose daughter Mary Woolstencroft, the author of Frankenstein, the young bard eloped, stirring up gossip. Shelley, a fledgling visionary, practiced his beliefs, decried all forms of organised morality and custom encumbered on humanity, and sought an exit from civilisational prohibitions. Paradoxically, he saw civilisation progressing with the help of poetry. A poet, being a metaphoric legislator is hand and glove with a scientific mind.

To all estimates, Shelley by temperament was a rebel, an unbridled chariot of imagination, capable of creating alternative world views, a carrier of a consciousness poking into imaginary realms, and a soul unattuned to conformity. An entrenched radical in politics, he searched for answers to the evils of authoritarianism and religious oppression. In 1811 the young poet wrote the pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism, sparking controversy and his expulsion from Oxford. In the pamphlet, he demanded that “no criminality should be attached to disbelief”. Shelley challenged the sacred and the worldly insouciantly. But in essence, he was not anti-religious, rather it was the hegemony of the Christine Church, its history of moral chicanery, that called for the leviathan inside him. His creatively vulnerable mind craved controversy and dissent. With no name on the title page of the collection Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson (1810) the poet bandies about the noted female of the title who attempted on the life of George III. Shelley’s inspirations were recreants, faithless, heretics and transgressors. Not surprisingly, he denounced figures of authority whether a king, a priest, a father or a patriarch. He was just 18 and in his first year at Oxford University when he wrote his most controversial poetical essay Existing State of Things. The 172-line poem was written in support of the Irish journalist Peter Finnerty, who had been jailed for libelling the Anglo-Irish politician, Viscount Castlereagh.

His commitment to the Irish cause can be seen in the fact that he distributed the pamphlet An Address to the Irish People (1812) in Dublin, showing solidarity with Irish Catholics. About the Existing State of Things, Michael Rossington, professor of romantic literature at the University of Newcastle, says that the poem demonstrates Shelley’s “belief that poetry can be used to alter public opinion and affect change”. Conspicuous to note that Shelley was attentive to British imperialism, Napoleonic Wars and slavery. His tone in the poem is incendiary, a sublime trademark: “Man must assert his native rights, must say/ we take from Monarchs’ hand the granted sway’”.

The poet tries to hammer home the apathy of the ruling class towards the masses. The reference to natives implies that Shelley was aware of Britain’s taking of territories outside Europe and laying down of plantations; a source of the colonial economy at the cost of beleaguered natives; understated in Jane Austen’s novel Mansfield Park (1841) in which Burtons’ family survive on the profuse income from a sugar plantation in Antigua. Shelley also rounds up British imperial presence in India: “The fainting Indian, on his native plains,/ Writhes to superior power’s unnumbered pains.”

The present-day readers from the Global South familiar with the descriptive of Empire would vouch that the axis of colonizer-colonised must have taken root in Shelley’s visceral mind. Reading Shelley today, the connection between romanticism and colonialism becomes alive. No wonder, it has taken the attention of 2oth Century scholarship. The expression romantic is a protean term as it also means uncanny and exotic, so the native in Edward Said’s view is exoticised, entailing otherness. Almost a hundred years afterwards, TS Eliot, who in some ways was a poet supportive of the establishment, did not condemn colonialism, a fact Virginia Woolf considered rather sophisticatedly in her novels. Still, the writer of The Wasteland was only awed by Hinduism and Sanskrit, amulets of spiritual solace, for the faith-forsaken Western civilisation.

Shelley, on the other hand, fisted gumption invoking the ire of the political establishment of his times. In Existing State of Things, he lashed at inept bureaucracy, political corruption and factious journalism. He wrote in times when the press was under censorship. He was both vociferous against and vigilant of institutional oppression, a bastion of modernity, yet a romantic soul, a daemon, a brooding melancholic, a wanderer of arboreal recesses and sojourner of pastoral alcoves. Altogether, Shelley is a triptych of reformists, revolutionaries and poets.

Speaking of Shelley’s unmatched verse, his earliest venture was a Gothic romance, Zastrozzi (1810), followed by some verse, feebler than his mature lyric poetry of succeeding years. The period spent in London (1812-13) was fructifying as he came across people like Thomas Peacock, and Leigh Hunt, and there came the Queen Mab (1813), a political epic in which Shelley attacked religious dogma. Shelley was convinced of using poetry to vent his political rage running the risk of falling prey to didactic propaganda-ism. Nonetheless, he wrote a pamphlet refuting Deism, of which Wordsworth was a follower, before he turned to pantheism. Indeed, Shelley disapproved of Wordsworth and Coleridge for selling their ideas to Christianity. In 1816, he travelled to Lake Geneva with his lover/ wife Mary and Byron and produced his masterpiece Mont Blanc (1817). Now, the philosophical and the romantic overwhelmed the political. Living a nomadic life, the Harriot-Mary-Shelley threesome lived in and out of wedlock with the women facing the calumny of carrying an immoral household. To define his aesthetic and carnal archetypes he wrote the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, a form of beauty that “words cannot express”. His model of beauty is not much different from Keats’s — an apotheosis of abstraction. But The Revolt of Islam (1817) demonstrates Shelley’s unwavering condemnation of war, monarchy, religious terror, plague and famine.

Financial stress and the death of his children made him leave for Italy, a phase in which the poet was an avoir la flemme. Prometheus Unbound (1820), a lyrical drama, was a perfect antidote to the listless mood and exhibited Shelley’s apocalyptic vision. Afterwards, the utopian Shelley and the ‘Mad Shelley’ executed a grounded optimism. To that end, in romantic poetics mythology, symbol and allegory form an aesthetic trinity of which Shelley is a profound exponent. To Sky Lark, Ode to the West Wind, Ozymandias, and Stanzas Written in Dejection Near Naples are outpourings of a melancholic, disillusioned, but not distracted person, seeking refuge in nature’s bounty. Yet the inner wound is far from being healed as the poet finds out that “our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought”, “I bleed and fall upon the thorns of life” paving an oxymoronic closure “whom men love not, and yet regret”. This piqued sensibility is best displayed in Adonis (1821), an elegy written to mourn Keats’s death, not only by tuberculosis but in Shelly’s view a death hastened by ruthless reviews of his work. Whether it was Manchester’s Massacre, Napoleonic terror, French Revolution, violence in Ireland, Harriot’s death and strained relations with both Mary and Godwin, the Italian climate discharged the dormant suffering of Shelley’s life into a poetic crescendo.

The circumstances of Shelley’s death (July 8, 1822) were both tragic and mythical after his schooner Don Juan was hit by a squall, drowning him. His body was washed up on the Tuscan shore with a copy of Keats’s poems tucked inside his pocket. The Italian quarantine regulations required the cremation of Shelley’s corpse (August 18) after his heart was plucked, later buried in Mary’s grave. One obituary quipped “infidel poetry.” Mary called him an “angel”, and the Victorian poet Arnold muddled Shelley’s genius by calling him “a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain”. One wonders if the poet’s cremation 200 years back is poetic justice to his unorthodox ideals or is just a quirk of fate.

The writer is a poet based in Lahore. His first collection of poems Lahore, I Am Coming (2017) was published by Punjab University Press