48 Famous Quotes by Percy Bysshe Shelley
8/4/1792 - 7/8/1822
Also Known As:
Percy Shelley
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Percy B Shelley
Professions:
Information:
About Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the major English Romantic poets and is critically regarded as among the finest lyric poets in the English language. A radical in his poetry and his political and social views, fame eluded him during his lifetime, but recognition grew steadily following his death. Shelley was a key member of a close circle of visionary poets and writers that included Lord Byron; Leigh Hunt; Thomas Love Peacock; and his own second wife, Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein.
Shelley is perhaps best known for such classic poems as Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark, Music, When Soft Voices Die, The Cloud and The Masque of Anarchy. His other major works include long, visionary poems such as Queen Mab, Alastor, The Revolt of Islam, Adonaïs, the unfinished work The Triumph of Life; and the visionary verse dramas The Cenci and Prometheus Unbound.
Shelley's early profession of atheism led to his expulsion from Oxford and branded him a radical agitator and thinker, setting an early pattern of marginalisation and ostracism from the intellectual and political circles of his time. His close circle of admirers, however, included some progressive thinkers of the day, including his future father-in-law, the philosopher William Godwin. Though Shelley's poetry and prose output remained steady throughout his life, most publishers and journals declined to publish his work for fear of being arrested themselves for blasphemy or sedition. Shelley did not live to see success and influence, although these reach down to the present day not only in literature, but in major movements in social and political thought.
Better than all measures
Of delightful sound,
Better than all treasures
That in books are found,
Thy skilled to poet were, thou scorner of the ground!
Larks
Quotes, by Percy Bysshe Shelley , Source: To a Skylark (st. 20)
|
Hail to thee blithe Spirit!
Bird thou never wert,
That from Heaven, or near it,
Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.
Larks
Quotes, by Percy Bysshe Shelley , Source: To a Skylark (st. 20)
|
Though we eat little flesh and drink no wine,
Yet let's be merry; we'll have tea and toast;
Custards for supper, and an endless host
Of syllabubs and jellies and mince-pies,
And other such ladylike luxuries.
Eating
Quotes, by Percy Bysshe Shelley , Source: Letter to Maria Gisborne
|
I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers,
From the seas and the streams;
I bear light shade for the leaves when laid
In their noonday dreams.
From my wings are shaken the dews that waken
The sweet buds every one,
When rocked to rest on their mother's breast,
As she dances about the sun.
I wield the flail of the lashing hail,
And whiten the green plains under,
And then again I dissolve it in rain,
And laugh as I pass in thunder.
Rain
Quotes, by Percy Bysshe Shelley , Source: The Cloud
|
And the wand-like lily which lifted up,
As a Maenad, its moonlight-coloured cup,
Till the fiery star, which is its eye,
Gazed through clear dew on the tender sky.
Lilies
Quotes, by Percy Bysshe Shelley , Source: The Sensitive Plant (pt. I)
|
January grey is here,
Like a sexton by her grave;
February bears the bier,
March with grief doth howl and rave,
And April weeps--but, O ye hours!
Follow with May's fairest flowers.
Seasons
Quotes, by Percy Bysshe Shelley , Source: Dirge for the Year (st. 4)
|
We look before and after,
And pine for what is not,
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught:
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
Sadness
Quotes, by Percy Bysshe Shelley , Source: To a Skylark (st. 18)
|
I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers,
From the seas and the streams;
I bear light shade for the leaves when laid
In their noonday dreams.
From my wings are shaken the dews that waken
The sweet buds every one,
When rocked to rest on their mother's breast,
As she dances about the sun.
I wield the flail of the lashing hail,
And whiten the green plains under,
And then again I dissolve it in rain,
And laugh as I pass in thunder.
Clouds
Quotes, by Percy Bysshe Shelley , Source: The Cloud
|
|
Heaven's ebon vault,
Studded with stars unutterably bright,
Through which the moon's unclouded grandeur rolls,
Seems like a canopy which love has spread
To curtain her sleeping world.
Sky
Quotes, by Percy Bysshe Shelley , Source: Queen Mab (pt. IV)
|
|
|
|
The Pilgrim of Eternity, whose fame
Over his living head like Heaven is bent,
An early but enduring monument,
Came, veiling all the lightnings of his song
In sorrow.
Eternity
Quotes, by Percy Bysshe Shelley , Source: Adonais (XXX)
|
In the firm expectation that when London shall be a habitation of
bitterns, when St. Paul and Westminster Abbey shall stand
shapeless and nameless ruins in the midst of an unpeopled marsh,
when the piers of Waterloo Bridge shall become the nuclei of
islets of reeds and osiers, and cast the jagged shadows of their
broken arches on the solitary stream, some Transatlantic
commentator will be weighing in the scales of some new and now
unimagined system of criticism the respective merits of the Bells
and the Fudges and their historians.
Ruin
Quotes, by Percy Bysshe Shelley , Source: Dedication to Peter Bell the Third
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder.
War
Quotes, by Percy Bysshe Shelley
|
