These questions will help to memorize Percy Bysshe Shelley personal life and his works mainly Adonais, Ode to the West Wind and A Defence of Poetry.
Q1: When Was Percy Bysshe Shelley born?
Answer: 4 August 1792
Q2: Where was Percy Bysshe Shelley born?
Answer: Field Place
Q3: After being expelled from Oxford, what the first thing Shelley did?
Answer: Shelley eloped to Scotland with a schoolgirl Harriet and married her at the age of 19. She was 16 at that time.
Q4: What happened with Shelley first wife?
Answer: Shelley wife Harriet drowned herself in the Serpentine in Hyde Park, London. After her death, Shelley married Mary.
Q5: Who was the second wife of Shelley?
Answer: The novelist Mary Shelley whose most famous novel is Frankenstein was the second wife of Shelley, the first wife name was Harriet.
Q6: Shelley was married to the daughter of a famous person, what was her name?
Answer: After being unhappy with his first marriage, Shelley married the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
Q7: Percy Bysshe Shelley was expelled from — university?
Answer: Oxford
Q8: Why Shelley was expelled from Oxford?
Answer: In 1811, Shelley wrote and circulated a pamphlet called The Necessity of Atheism but on inquiry, he refused its ownership and he expelled from Oxford on 25th March 1811.
Q9: What was the first publication of Shelley?
Answer: It was a Gothic novel Zastrozzi published in 1810.
Q10: Whose poetry Shelley published along with his sister?
Answer: Shelley together with his sister Elizabeth, published Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire.
Q11: What is the form of Shelley poem Adonais?
Answer: Adonais is a pastoral elegy that Shelley wrote for John Keats after his death. The full name is Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats, Author of Endymion, Hyperion etc.
Q12: When was Adonais composed and how many stanzas are in it?
Answer: Adonais was composed in spring of 1821 immediately after Keats death and it has 495 lines in 55 Spenserian stanzas.
Q13: How Percy Bysshe Shelley knew John Keats?
Answer: Shelley friend Leigh Hunt introduced Shelley to Keats in Hampstead towards the end of 1816.
Q14: In Shelley’s Adonais, which poets mourn Keats death?
Answer: Along with Shelley, Byron, Thomas Moore and Leigh Hunt mourned Keats death in Adonais.
Q15: In eternity, who come to greet John Keats (in Adonais)?
Answer: Thomas Chatterton, Sir Philip Sydney, and the Roman poet Lucan.
Q16: When was Ode to the West Wind written?
Answer: Ode to the West Wind is an Ode written in 1819, it was originally published in 1820 by Charles Ollier ( a publisher and author).
Q17: What is the writing pattern of Ode to the West Wind?
Answer: It consists of five cantos and the ode is written in iambic pentameter.
Q18: While writing Ode to the West Wind, which important event was in Shelley’s mind?
Answer: Peterloo Massacre of August 1819.
Q19: When was the A Defence of Poetry written?
Answer: It is an essay written by Shelley in 1821 and published in 1840 by Shelley wife Mary.
Q20: In whose response Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote A Defence of Poetry?
Answer: A Defence of Poetry was written in response to Thomas Love Peacock’s article The Four Ages of Poetry.
Q21: For which magazine Percy Bysshe Shelley used to write articles?
Answer: The Examiner
Q22: How did Percy Bysshe Shelley die?
Answer: He was drowned at an Italian coast while sailing in a storm.
Q23: When did Shelley die?
Answer: 8 July 1822 at the age of 29.
Q24: What is the name of famous novelist who satirized Shelley along with S.T Coleridge?
Answer: Thomas Love Peacock in his novella Nightmare Abbey satirized them. He humorously portrayed characters that depict Shelley and Coleridge.
Q25: What literary age Shelley belong?
Answer: Shelley belongs to the younger generation of English Romantic poets along with John Keats and Lord Byron.
Q26: When was The Revolt of Islam written and what is its focus?
Answer: It is a poem published in 1818, it was firstly published in 1817 under the title of Laon and Cythna; or, The Revolution of the Golden City: A Vision of the Nineteenth Century. The focus of this poem is not only Islam and it also symbolizes the French Revolution. (You can check more on the wiki.)
List of the Major works of Percy Bysshe Shelley:
- The Wandering Jew (1810)
2) Zastrozzi (1810)
3) Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire (1810)
4) Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson: Being Poems Found Amongst the Papers of That Noted Female Who Attempted the Life of the King in 1876 (1810)
5) St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian (1811)
6) The Necessity of Atheism (1811)
7) The Devil’s Walk: A Ballad (1812)
8) Queen Mab: A Philosophical Poem (1813)
9) A Refutation of Deism: In a Dialogue (1814)
10) Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude (1815)
11) Wolfstein; or, The Mysterious Bandit (chapbook) ( 1815)
12) The Daemon of the World ( 1816)
13) Mont Blanc ( 1816)
14) Hymn to Intellectual Beauty (1817)
15) Laon and Cythna; or, The Revolution of the Golden City: A Vision of the Nineteenth Century (1817)
16) The Revolt of Islam, A Poem, in Twelve Cantos (1817)
17) History of Six Weeks’ Tour through a part of France, Switzerland, Germany, and Holland (with Mary Shelley)) ( 1817)
18) Ozymandias (1818)
19) The Banquet or The Symposium by Plato, translation from Greek into English (1818)
20) Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (Preface) ( 1818)
21) Rosalind and Helen: A Modern Eclogue ( 1818)
22) Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills, October 1818 (1818)
23) The Cenci, A Tragedy, in Five Acts (1819)
24) Ode to The West Wind (1819)
25) The Masque of Anarchy ( 1819)
26) Men of England ( 1819)
27) England in 1819 (1819)
28) A Philosophical View of Reform (1819)
29) Julian and Maddalo: A Conversation (1819)
30) Peter Bell the Third (1819)
31) Prometheus Unbound, A Lyrical Drama, in Four Acts (1820)
32) To a Skylark (1820)
33) The Cloud (1820)
34) Oedipus Tyrannus; Or, Swellfoot The Tyrant: a tragedy in Two Acts ( 1820)
35) Hellas, A Lyrical Drama (1821)
36) Ion by Plato, translation from Greek into English (1921)
37) A Defence of Poetry (1821)
38) Epipsychidion (1821)
39) The Triumph of Life (182)
