What Kind of Angel: On Percy Shelley

Two hundred years ago this summer, the maddeningly reckless poet Percy Bysshe Shelley rode a double masted sailboat straight into the maw of a storm off the coast of Italy. He drowned, as did the two other men on board when the ship went down 10 miles from shore in the Gulf of La Spezia. This was the definitive end to Percy’s life, but, as often happens in literature, only the beginning of his story.

For days after he disappeared, Percy’s family and friends held out hope that perhaps he was alive and convalescing somewhere along the coastline. Eventually, his body washed ashore near the town of Viareggio, dashing all hopes. According to one account, he was only identifiable because of a book of Keats poems in his jacket. Percy had wanted to be buried in Rome, but the manner of his death made this wish difficult to fulfill. Italian law dictated that anything washed ashore by the sea must be burned to prevent the spread of plague. Percy’s body was buried in the sand for weeks until a small group could perform a beachside cremation. The party entrusted to this gruesome duty included Lord Byron, Europe’s most famous poet and one of Percy’s closest friends. Byron later wrote of Percy, “He was the best and least selfish man I knew.”

In his 29 years, Percy published a smattering of poems, a play, and a pair of pretty bad novels; gentlefolk and members of the establishment knew him in life more for his godless behavior than the lilting cadence of his lines. From the vantage of the gatekeepers of literature, on the day his ashes were interred in a cemetery in Rome, Percy Bysshe Shelley seemed destined to be forgotten. Lucky for us, they were very wrong.

In the decades after his death, Percy gained a literary reputation as “a sweet angel,” beautiful in art if ineffectual in life. This view is a misreading on two fronts, of the nature of angels (who are bearers of havoc) and of the particular man in question.

*

Percy Shelley was born into a family with a hereditary title that was destined to be his as firstborn son; this, plus the wealth of his paternal grandfather, should have guaranteed him an easy stride through life. But young Percy didn’t make anything easy on himself. He was 18 when he got himself kicked out of Oxford for being an atheist and an anarchist. He was