The 100 Most Influential Writers of All Time (20 page)

(b. Aug. 4, 1792, Field Place, near Horsham, Sussex, Eng.—d. July 8, 1822, at sea off Livorno, Tuscany [Italy])

P
ercy Bysshe Shelley was an English Romantic poet whose passionate search for personal love and social justice was gradually channeled from overt actions into poems that rank with the greatest in the English language.

Shelley was the heir to rich estates acquired by his grandfather, Bysshe (pronounced “Bish”) Shelley. Between
the spring of 1810 and that of 1811, he published two Gothic novels and two volumes of juvenile verse. In the fall of 1810 Shelley entered University College, Oxford; he was expelled the following year. Late in August 1811, Shelley eloped with Harriet Westbrook, the younger daughter of a London tavern owner; by marrying her, he betrayed the acquisitive plans of his grandfather and father, who tried to starve him into submission but only drove the strong-willed youth to rebel against the established order. Early in 1812, Shelley, Harriet, and her older sister Eliza Westbrook went to Dublin, where Shelley circulated pamphlets advocating political rights for Roman Catholics, autonomy for Ireland, and freethinking ideals.

Lack of money finally drove Shelley to moneylenders in London, where in 1813 he issued
Queen Mab
, his first major poem—a nine-canto mixture of blank verse and lyric measures that attacks the evils of the past and present (commerce, war, the eating of meat, the church, monarchy, and marriage) but ends with resplendent hopes for humanity when freed from these vices. In June 1813 Harriet Shelley gave birth to their daughter Ianthe, but a year later Shelley fell in love with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, daughter of William Godwin and his first wife,
née
Mary Wollstonecraft. Against Godwin's objections, Shelley and Mary Godwin eloped to France on July 27, 1814. Following travels through France, Switzerland, and Germany, they returned to London, where they were shunned by the Godwins and most other friends.

By mid-May 1816, Shelley, Mary, and Mary's stepsister Claire Clairmont hurried to Geneva to intercept Lord Byron, with whom Claire had begun an affair. During this memorable summer, Shelley composed the poems “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” and “Mont Blanc,” and Mary began her novel
Frankenstein
, the novel for which she would become best known. Shelley's party returned
to England in September, settling in Bath. Late in the year, Harriet Shelley drowned herself in London, and on Dec. 30, 1816, Shelley and Mary were married with the Godwins' blessing.

In March 1817 the Shelleys settled near Peacock at Marlow, where Shelley wrote his twelve-canto romance-epic
Laon and Cythna; or, The Revolution of the Golden City
and Mary Shelley finished
Frankenstein
. They compiled
History of a Six Weeks' Tour
jointly from the letters and journals of their trips to Switzerland. In November,
Laon and Cythna
was suppressed by its printer and publisher, who feared that Shelley's idealized tale of a peaceful national revolution, bloodily suppressed by a league of king and priests, violated the laws against blasphemous libel. After revisions, it was reissued in 1818 as
The Revolt of Islam
. Because Shelley's health suffered from the climate and his financial obligations outran his resources, the Shelleys and Claire Clairmont went to Italy, where Byron was residing.

Thus far, Shelley's literary career had been politically oriented. But in Italy, far from the daily irritations of British politics, Shelley deepened his understanding of art and literature and, unable to reshape the world to conform to his vision, he concentrated on embodying his ideals within his poems.

In early 1818–19 Shelley wrote
Prometheus Unbound
and outlined
The Cenci
, a tragedy on the Elizabethan model based on a case of incestuous rape and patricide in sixteenth-century Rome. He completed this drama during the summer of 1819. Memorable characters, classic five-act structure, powerful and evocative language, and moral ambiguities still make
The Cenci
theatrically effective. Even so, it is a less notable achievement than
Prometheus Unbound: A Lyrical Drama
, the keystone of Shelley's poetic achievement, which Shelley completed at Florence in the autumn of 1819. Both plays appeared about 1820.

After moving to Pisa in 1820, Shelley was stung by hostile reviews into expressing his hopes more guardedly. In 1821, however, he reasserted his uncompromising idealism.
Epipsychidion
(in couplets) mythologizes his infatuation with Teresa (“Emilia”) Viviani, a convent-bound young admirer, into a Dantesque fable of how human desire can be fulfilled through art. His essay
A Defence of Poetry
(published 1840) eloquently declares that the poet creates humane values and imagines the forms that shape the social order: thus each mind recreates its own private universe, and “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World.”

After the Shelleys moved to Lerici in 1822, Percy Shelley began
The Triumph of Life
, a dark fragment on which he was at work until he sailed to Leghorn to welcome his friend Leigh Hunt, who had arrived to edit a periodical called
The Liberal
. Shelley drowned on July 8, 1822, when his boat sank during the stormy return voyage to Lerici.

After her husband's death, Mary Shelley returned to England and devoted herself to publicizing Shelley's writings and educating their only surviving child, Percy Florence Shelley. She published her late husband's
Posthumous Poems
(1824) and also edited his
Poetical Works
(1839), with long and invaluable notes, and his prose works. Her
Journal
is a rich source of Shelley biography, and her letters are an indispensable adjunct. By 1840 she had disseminated his fame and most of his writings.

(b. Oct. 31, 1795, London, Eng.—d. Feb. 23, 1821, Rome, Papal States [Italy])

J
ohn Keats was an English Romantic lyric poet who devoted his short life to the perfection of a poetry
marked by vivid imagery, great sensuous appeal, and an attempt to express a philosophy through classical legend.

The son of a livery-stable manager, Keats received relatively little formal education. He was apprenticed to a surgeon in 1811, but he broke off his apprenticeship in 1814 and went to live in London, where he worked as a dresser, or junior house surgeon, at Guy's and St. Thomas' hospitals. After 1817 he devoted himself entirely to poetry.

His first mature poem is the sonnet
On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer
(1816), which was inspired by his excited reading of George Chapman's classic 17th-century translation of the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
. Keats's first book,
Poems
, was published in March 1817. The volume is remarkable only for some delicate natural observation and some obvious Spenserian influences.

In 1817 Keats began work on
Endymion
, his first long poem, which appeared in 1818. This work is divided into four 1,000-line sections, and its verse is composed in loose rhymed couplets. The poem narrates a version of the Greek legend of the moon goddess Diana's (or Cynthia's) love for Endymion, a mortal shepherd, but Keats put the emphasis on Endymion's love for Diana rather than on hers for him and thus transformed the tale to express the widespread Romantic theme of the attempt to find in actuality an ideal love that has been glimpsed heretofore only in imaginative longings.

In the summer of 1818 Keats went on a walking tour in the Lake District (of northern England) and Scotland, and his exposure and overexertions on that trip brought on the first symptoms of the tuberculosis of which he was to die. On his return to London a brutal criticism of his early poems appeared in
Blackwood's Magazine
, followed by a similar attack on
Endymion
in the
Quarterly Review
. Contrary to later assertions, Keats met these reviews with
a calm assertion of his own talents, and he went on steadily writing poetry. But there were family troubles, and Keats also met Fanny Brawne, a near neighbour in Hampstead, with whom he soon fell hopelessly and tragically in love. The relation with Brawne had a decisive effect on Keats's development.

It was during the year 1819 that all his greatest poetry was written—
Lamia
,
The Eve of St. Agnes
, the great odes (
On Indolence
,
On a Grecian Urn
,
To Psyche
,
To a Nightingale
,
On Melancholy
, and
To Autumn
), and the two versions of
Hyperion
. This poetry was composed under the strain of illness and his growing love for Brawne; and it is an astonishing body of work, marked by careful and considered development, technical, emotional, and intellectual.
The Eve of St. Agne
s may be considered the perfect culmination of Keats's earlier poetic style. Written in the first flush of his meeting with Brawne, it conveys an atmosphere of passion and excitement in its description of the elopement of a pair of youthful lovers.

The odes are Keats's most distinctive poetic achievement. In the
Ode to a Nightingale
a visionary happiness in communing with the nightingale and its song is contrasted with the dead weight of human grief and sickness, and the transience of youth and beauty—strongly brought home to Keats in recent months by the death of one of his brothers. This theme is taken up more distinctly in the
Ode on a Grecian Urn
. The figures of the lovers depicted on the Greek urn become for him the symbol of an enduring but unconsummated passion that subtly belies the poem's celebrated conclusion, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

Keats's fragmentary poetic epic,
Hyperion
, exists in two versions, the second being a revision of the first with the addition of a long prologue in a new style, which makes it into a different poem.
Hyperion
was begun in the autumn
of 1818, and all that there is of the first version was finished by April 1819. These two versions cover the period of Keats's most intense experience, both poetical and personal. The poem is his last attempt, in the face of increasing illness and frustrated love, to come to terms with the conflict between absolute value and mortal decay that appears in other forms in his earlier poetry.

The poems
Isabella
,
Lamia
,
The Eve of St. Agnes
, and
Hyperion
and the odes were all published in the famous 1820 volume, the one that gives the true measure of his powers. He had been increasingly ill throughout 1819, and by the beginning of 1820 the evidence of tuberculosis was clear. He realized that it was his death warrant, and from that time sustained work became impossible. Keats sailed for Italy in September 1820; when he reached Rome, he had a relapse and died there.

(b. May 26 [June 6, New Style], 1799, Moscow, Russia—d. Jan. 29 [Feb. 10], 1837, St. Petersburg)

T
he Russian poet, novelist, dramatist, and short-story writer Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin has often been considered his country's greatest poet and the founder of modern Russian literature.

In 1817 Pushkin accepted a post in the foreign office at St. Petersburg, where he was elected to Arzamás, an exclusive literary circle founded by his uncle's friends. In his political verses and epigrams, widely circulated in manuscript, he made himself the spokesman for the ideas and aspirations of those who were to take part in the Decembrist rising of 1825, the unsuccessful culmination of a Russian revolutionary movement in its earliest stage.

For these political poems, Pushkin was banished from St. Petersburg in May 1820 to a remote southern province.
Sent first to Yekaterinoslav (now Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine), he was there taken ill. While convalescing, he traveled in the northern Caucasus and later to the Crimea. The impressions he gained provided material for his “southern cycle” of romantic narrative poems, published 1820–23. Although this cycle of poems confirmed the reputation of the author of
Ruslan i Lyudmila
(1820;
Ruslan and Ludmila
), his first major work, and Pushkin was hailed as the leading Russian poet of the day, he himself was not satisfied with it. In May 1823 he started work on his central masterpiece, the novel in verse
Yevgeny Onegin
(1833), on which he continued to work intermittently until 1831.
Yevgeny Onegin
unfolds a panoramic picture of Russian life. The characters it depicts and immortalizes—Onegin, the disenchanted skeptic; Lensky, the romantic, freedom-loving poet; and Tatyana, the heroine, a profoundly affectionate study of Russian womanhood—are typically Russian and are shown in relationship to the social and environmental forces by which they are molded.

Remarks in letters intercepted by police resulted in Pushkin being exiled to his mother's estate of Mikhaylovskoye, near Pskov, at the other end of Russia. Although the two years at Mikhaylovskoye were unhappy for Pushkin, they were to prove one of his most productive periods. Alone and isolated, he embarked on a close study of Russian history; he came to know the peasants on the estate and interested himself in noting folktales and songs. During this period the specifically Russian features of his poetry became steadily more marked. He wrote the provincial chapters of
Yevgeny Onegin
as well as one of his major works, the historical tragedy
Boris Godunov
(1831). Written just before the Decembrist uprising,
Boris Godunov
treats the burning question of the relations between the ruling classes, headed by the tsar, and the masses; it is the moral
and political significance of the latter, “the judgment of the people,” that Pushkin emphasizes. Pushkin's ability to create psychological and dramatic unity, despite the episodic construction, and to heighten the dramatic tension by economy of language, detail, and characterization make this outstanding play a revolutionary event in the history of Russian drama.