• Most of his poems us both rhyming couplets and alternating rhyme - they have internal rhyme.

• His poems are quite melancholic and depressing - but in a relatable/ understandable manner and feature themes like; unrequited love, grief, natural world, heaven, etc.

• This provides insight to Shelly's life, by suggesting how he felt about life - being lonely and rejected and unrequited by those within his life and others

The Cold Earth Slept Below - Nov 1815

Stanzas Written in Dejection - Dec 1818

Ode to the West Wind - Oct 25th 1819

The Question - 1821

Biography

Born 1792, backdrop of French Revolution & subversive pamphleteering, Born at Field Place.

Attended Oxford 1810 - 1811 (traditional royalist stronghold) and was kicked out for publishing a pamphlet declaring himself an atheist

Key dates

• 1816 - Harriet Westbrook commits suicide and drowns in the Serpentine

• 1816 - Marries Mary Shelley (nee,. Godwin), hoping it would gain stability for him to gain custody of his 2 children with Harriet (doesn't gain custody)

• Sep, 1818 - Clara died (Shelley's godchild) on route with Mary Shelley to join Percy in Venice with Claire (Mary's half-sister) and Byron

• Dec 1818 - Birth of his ‘Neopolitan Charge’ (Elena) and later, following her death, Paolo Foggi blackmails him & he develops semi-suicidal depression (Stanzas written in Dejection)

• June 1819, His son, William, dies (4 years old)

Politics

Interested in Political and Philosophical ideas, versus solely aestheic ideas - views himself as a political radical. He was interested in social reform instead of the fashionable ‘sickly sensibility’. He asserted his interest in philosophy when he attempted to initiate a friendship with William Godwin (Mary Shelley's Father, looked at re-establishing the rights of man) - as part of Godwin's philosophy he believed all sentiments are considered and expressed as impersonal and objective facts, according to the universal principles of reason; persued by Shelley pursues this notion in theory, but not really accomplished in fact.

At this time

Religion

Historical Background

Battle of Peterloo, 16th August 1819 - 60,000 men and women attacked and