Quote of the Day (Percy Bysshe Shelley, Urging the People to ‘Rise Like Lions After Slumber’)

“Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number—
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you—
Ye are many—they are few." —English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), “The Mask of Anarchy: Written on the Occasion of the Massacre at Manchester” (1819)
 
Two hundred years ago today, Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned in a shipwreck off the coast of Italy at age 29. His private behavior (including adultery) and open radicalism (most notoriously at the time, his avowed atheism) scandalized the English public, and as with the older poet he admired and befriended, Lord Byron, overshadowed his enormous technical skill and grace with verse.
 
Once the controversies of his lifetime died down, that abundant talent could be better appreciated. At the same time, once that occurred, it also diluted the force of his personal demonstration that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world."
 
Shelley lived virtually every day of his adult life on the edge. He was skeptical alike in matters of faith and governance, calling, for instance, for his country’s common people to protest the “massacre” alluded to in the above verses at Peterloo, England, in August 1819, when saber-wielding cavalry charged on thousands gathered to demand parliamentary reform.
 
It would take nearly a half century for parliamentary reform to be enacted in full. It would be seven years after Shelley’s decade for another one of his causes, Catholic Emancipation, to be realized. His defiance towards convention remains an abiding impulse shuddered at by the likes of the neoconservative English journalist and historian Paul Johnson, who included him in his rogues’ gallery of leftist Intellectuals (1989).
 
For an interesting consideration of the circumstances surrounding Shelley’s death—including conspiracy theories that inevitably circulated—I urge you to read Madeleine Callaghan’s post from the Liverpool University Press Blog.