His personal relations with women were less respectful. He was an ardent supporter of female emancipation and of gender equality, and had a profound respect for the work of Mary Wollstonecraft. Shelley’s politics were progressive, as were his political attitudes towards women. At this time, Percy and Mary were living and travelling with Lord Byron and Mary’s half-sister Claire Clairmont, a formidable ménage of literary creativity. At the age of 18, Mary wrote Frankenstein, an astonishingly mature work about the hubris of an irresponsible inventor who creates the first of a new race but denies its human needs – with catastrophic consequences. His wife was Mary Shelley, daughter of another political radical, William Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft, generally recognised as the mother of British feminism. Part of Shelley’s allure is the people who surrounded him. If Keats was a first love, Shelley is a mature one “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” he wrote. The Mask of Anarchy satirises the government of the day as the epitome of anarchy and injustice, and ends with an impassioned appeal for ordinary people to rise up: “Ye are many, they are few.” Shelley was thrown out of Oxford in connection with his essay The Necessity of Atheism, and he strongly believed in poetry as a powerful force for political good. Meanwhile England in 1819, written in the last year of the reign of George III who had for years been mentally incapable, tells of “Rulers who neither see nor feel nor know, But leechlike to their fainting Country cling”. Perhaps his most famous poem, Ozymandias, mocks the empty legacy of a puffed-up despot. He was a rebel at heart, distrustful of authority, and raged at abuses of power by what he saw as the unaccountable and heartless establishment. Like the outgoing prime minister, Shelley went to Eton, but the common ground stops there. All the while I’ve been preparing – in my downtime – to commemorate 200 years since the death of a titan of English poetry and a political radical. What would he have made of the dramatic resignation this week by Boris Johnson after weeks of his authority ebbing away? A flight of fancy of course, but an irresistible one for me, whose working life these last days and weeks has been dominated by the disintegration of Johnson’s credibility. P ercy Bysshe Shelley: poet, atheist, and determined opponent of the over-powerful.
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