Mask Of Anarchy

By Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley is more widely known as one of the great Romantic Poets. Yet in his short life he was politically active and in writing The Masque of Anarchy in 1819 and basing it on preceding events at the bloody massacre at Peterloo he helps to give voice to alternative notion of non violent resistance. Although not published until after his death it remains a defining poem of its time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Copyright Group
• Release date: Aug 20, 2013
• ISBN: 9781780004594

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was an English Romantic poet. Born into a prominent political family, Shelley enjoyed a quiet and happy childhood in West Sussex, developing a passion for nature and literature at a young age. He struggled in school, however, and was known by his colleagues at Eton College and University College, Oxford as an outsider and eccentric who spent more time acquainting himself with radical politics and the occult than with the requirements of academia. During his time at Oxford, he began his literary career in earnest, publishing Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire (1810) and St. Irvine; or, The Rosicrucian: A Romance (1811) In 1811, he married Harriet Westbrook, with whom he lived an itinerant lifestyle while pursuing affairs with other women. Through the poet Robert Southey, he fell under the influence of political philosopher William Godwin, whose daughter Mary soon fell in love with the precocious young poet. In the summer of 1814, Shelley eloped to France with Mary and her stepsister Claire Claremont, travelling to Holland, Germany, and Switzerland before returning to England in the fall. Desperately broke, Shelley struggled to provide for Mary through several pregnancies while balancing his financial obligations to Godwin, Harriet, and his own father. In 1816, Percy and Mary accepted an invitation to join Claremont and Lord Byron in Europe, spending a summer in Switzerland at a house on Lake Geneva. In 1818, following several years of unhappy life in England, the Shelleys—now married—moved to Italy, where Percy worked on The Masque of Anarchy (1819), Prometheus Unbound (1820), and Adonais (1821), now considered some of his most important works. In July of 1822, Shelley set sail on the Don Juan and was lost in a storm only hours later. His death at the age of 29 was met with despair and contempt throughout England and Europe, and he is now considered a leading poet and radical thinker of the Romantic era.

Book preview

Percy Bysshe Shelley - The Mask of Anarchy

Written on the occasion of the massacre carried out by the British Government 

at Peterloo, Manchester 1819

As I lay asleep in Italy

There came a voice from over the Sea,

And with great power it forth led me

To walk in the visions of Poesy.

I met Murder on the way

He had a mask like Castlereagh

Very smooth he looked, yet grim;

Seven blood-hounds followed him:

All were fat; and well they might

Be in admirable plight,

For one by one, and two by two,

He tossed the human hearts to chew

Which from his wide cloak he drew.

Next came Fraud,