His career as a poet began, characteristically enough, with the publication, while at Oxford, of a volume of political rimes, entitled Margaret Nicholson’s Remains, Margaret Nicholson being the crazy woman who tried to stab George III.  His boyish poem, Queen Mab, was published in 1813; Alastor in 1816, and the Revolt of Islam—­his longest—­in 1818, all before he was twenty-one.  These were filled with splendid, though unsubstantial, imagery, but they were abstract in subject, and had the faults of incoherence and formlessness which make Shelley’s longer poems wearisome and confusing.  They sought to embody his social creed of perfectionism, as well as a certain vague pantheistic system of belief in a spirit of love in nature and man, whose presence is a constant source of obscurity in Shelley’s verse.  In 1818 he went to Italy, where the last four years of his life were passed, and where, under the influences of Italian art and poetry, his writing became deeper and stronger.  He was fond of yachting, and spent much of his time upon the Mediterranean.  In the summer of 1822 his boat was swamped in a squall, off the Gulf of Spezzia, and Shelley’s drowned body was washed ashore, and burned in the presence of Byron and Leigh Hunt.  The ashes were entombed in the Protestant cemetery at Rome, with the epitaph, Cor cordium.

Shelley’s best and maturest work, nearly all of which was done in Italy, includes his tragedy, The Cenci, 1819, and his lyrical drama, Prometheus Unbound, 1821.  The first of these has a unity and a definiteness of contour unusual with Shelley, and is, with the exception of some of Robert Browning’s, the best English tragedy since Otway.  Prometheus represented to Shelley’s mind the human spirit fighting against divine oppression, and in his portrayal of this figure he kept in mind not only the Prometheus of Aeschylus, but the Satan of Paradise Lost.  Indeed, in this poem, Shelley came nearer to the sublime than any English poet since Milton.  Yet it is in lyrical, rather than in dramatic, quality that Prometheus Unbound is great.  If Shelley be not, as his latest editor, Mr. Forman, claims him to be, the foremost of English lyrical poets, he is at least the most lyrical of them.  He had, in a supreme degree, the “lyric cry.”  His vibrant nature trembled to every breath of emotion, and his nerves craved ever newer shocks; to pant, to quiver, to thrill, to grow faint in the spasm of intense sensation.  The feminine cast observable in Shelley’s portrait is borne out by this tremulous sensibility in his verse.  It is curious how often he uses the metaphor of wings:  of the winged spirit, soaring, like his skylark, till lost in music, rapture, light, and then falling back to earth.  Three successive moods—­longing, ecstasy, and the revulsion of despair—­are expressed in many of his lyrics; as in the Hymn to the Spirit of Nature in Prometheus, in the ode To a Skylark, and in the Lines to an Indian Air—­Edgar Poe’s favorite.  His passionate desire to lose himself in Nature, to become one with that spirit of love and beauty in the universe which was to him in place of God, is expressed in the Ode to the West Wind, his most perfect poem: