Shelley was working on the poem when he accidentally drowned on 8 July 1822 during a storm on a voyage from Leghorn.[2]
The poem was first published in the collection Posthumous Poems (1824) published in London by John and Henry L. Hunt which was edited by his wife Mary Shelley, who emphasised the importance of the work.
The theme of the poem is an exploration of the nature of being and reality.[1] For Shelley, life itself, the "painted veil" which obscures and disguises the immortal spirit, is a more universal conqueror than love, death, fame, chastity, divinity, or time, and, in a dream vision, he sees this triumphal chariot pass, "on the storm of its own rushing splendour," over the captive multitude of men.[3] Ultimately, natural life corrupts and triumphs over the spirit.[4]
Lines 1–40. Introduction: The narrator introduces himself, explains that his untold personal crisis must "remain untold", and describes the dream Vision.
Lines 41–175. The visionary triumphal pageant is described.
41 The narrator describes a "stream of people" in the street.
54 Each person is described as deficient, limited, and obsessed.
67 They do not attend to nature.
77 He sees an icy glaring light approach, and a chariot bearing the hooded figure of Life.
94 The chariot is led by a blindfolded Janus figure, a Shadow.
110 The pageant is attended by a crowd of a million, like a Roman triumph.
128 There are also the sacred few who flee from the chariot.
137 There is wild dancing.
159 Some of them fall and the chariot passes over them.
164 The old men and women left behind, sink to corruption.
↑ Bradley, A. C. "Notes on Shelley's 'Triumph of Life'." The Modern Language Review, Vol. 9, No. 4 (Oct. 1914), pp. 441–456.
↑ The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21). Volume XII. The Romantic Revival.III. Shelley.§ 9. The Triumph of Life. NY: Putnam, 1907–21.
↑ Hodgson, John A. "The World's Mysterious Doom: Shelley's The Triumph of Life." ELH, 42 (1975): 595–622.
↑ Shelley, Percy Bysshe; Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft (1824). Posthumous poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Duke University Libraries. London, Printed for John and Henry L. Hunt.
Bradley, A. C. "Notes on Shelley's 'Triumph of Life'." The Modern Language Review, Vol. 9, No. 4 (Oct. 1914), pp.441–456.
The Cambridge history of English and American literature: An encyclopaedia in eighteen volumes, ed. by A.W. Ward, A.R. Waller, W.P. Trent, J. Erskine, S.P. Sherman, and C. Van Doren. NY: Putnam, 1907–1921.
Baker, Carols, "Shelley: The Triumph of Life," Master Poems of the English Language. Ed Oscar Williams New York Trident Press, 1966.
Bloom, Harold "The Two spirits, Adonis and 'The Triumph of Life', Shelley; A collection of critical Essays. Ed. George M. Ridenowr. New Delhi, Prentice Hall of India 1980.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Triumph of Life, Master Poems of the English Language. Edited by Oscar Williams. New York Trident Press, 1966.
Shelley's The Triumph of Life: A Critical Study. Edited and with an introd. by Donald Henry Reiman. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1965.
Rieger, James. Review: Shelley's "The Triumph of Life": A Critical Study. Based on a Text Newly Edited from the Bodleian Manuscript by Donald H. Reiman.Keats-Shelley Journal, Vol. 15, (Winter, 1966), pp. 128–130.
Butter, P. H. "Sun and Shape in Shelley's 'The Triumph of Life'." Review of English Studies, Volume XIII, Issue 49, 1962, pp. 40–51.
Matthews, G. M. "On Shelley's 'The Triumph of Life'," Studia Neophilologica, Volume 34, Issue 1, 1962, pp. 104–134.
Mooney, Jennifer. "The Fathers and the Power of Love: Allen Tate's Modern Triumph of Life." Border States: Journal of the Kentucky-Tennessee American Studies Association, No. 8 (1991).
Weisman, Karen A. "Shelley's Triumph of Life over Fiction." Philological Quarterly, 71.3 (1992): 337–60.
Vassallo, Peter. "From Petrarch to Dante: The Discourse of Disenchantment in Shelley's The Triumph of Life." Journal of Anglo-Italian Studies 1 (1991): 102–10.
Wang, Orrin N. C. "Disfiguring Monuments: History in Paul de Man's 'Shelley Disfigured' and Percy Bysshe Shelley's 'The Triumph of Life.'" ELH, 58.3 (1991): 633–55.
Swaminathan, S. R. "Vedanta and Shelley's 'The Triumph of Life.'" Keats-Shelley Review, 9 (1995): 63–78.
Dawson, P. M. S. "'The Mask of Darkness': Metaphor, Myth, and History in Shelley's 'The Triumph of Life.'" Behrendt, Stephen C. (ed.). History and Myth: Essays on English Romantic Literature. Detroit, MI: Wayne State UP, 1990. 235–44.
Chaudhary, Mukhtar. "Shelley's Pickings in 'The Triumph of Life' and 'Hellas'." Umm Al-Qura University Journal for Languages & Literature, January 2009.
An ode is a type of lyrical stanza. It is an elaborately structured poem praising or glorifying an event or individual, describing nature intellectually as well as emotionally. A classic ode is structured in three major parts: the strophe, the antistrophe, and the epode. Different forms such as the homostrophic ode and the irregular ode also enter.
"Ozymandias" is a sonnet written by the English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822). It was first published in the 11 January 1818 issue of The Examiner of London. The poem was included the following year in Shelley's collection Rosalind and Helen, A Modern Eclogue; with Other Poems, and in a posthumous compilation of his poems published in 1826.
Terza rima is a rhyming verse form, in which the poem, or each poem-section, consists of tercets with an interlocking three-line rhyme scheme: The last word of the second line in one tercet provides the rhyme for the first and third lines in the tercet that follows. The poem or poem-section may have any number of lines, but it ends with either a single line or a couplet, which repeats the rhyme of the middle line of the previous tercet.
"Ode to the West Wind" is an ode, written by Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1819 in Cascine wood near Florence, Italy. It was originally published in 1820 by Charles in London as part of the collection Prometheus Unbound, A Lyrical Drama in Four Acts, With Other Poems. Perhaps more than anything else, Shelley wanted his message of reform and revolution spread, and the wind becomes the trope for spreading the word of change through the poet-prophet figure. Some also believe that the poem was written in response to the loss of his son, William in 1819. The ensuing pain influenced Shelley. The poem allegorises the role of the poet as the voice of change and revolution. At the time of composing this poem, Shelley without doubt had the Peterloo Massacre of August 1819 in mind. His other poems written at the same time—"The Masque of Anarchy", Prometheus Unbound, and "England in 1819"—take up these same themes of political change, revolution, and role of the poet.
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Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats, Author of Endymion, Hyperion, etc. is a pastoral elegy written by Percy Bysshe Shelley for John Keats in 1821, and widely regarded as one of Shelley's best and best-known works. The poem, which is in 495 lines in 55 Spenserian stanzas, was composed in the spring of 1821 immediately after 11 April, when Shelley heard of Keats' death. It is a pastoral elegy, in the English tradition of John Milton's Lycidas. Shelley had studied and translated classical elegies. The title of the poem is modelled on ancient works, such as Achilleis, an epic poem by the 1st-century AD Roman poet Statius, and refers to the untimely death of the Greek Adonis, a god of fertility. Some critics suggest that Shelley used Virgil's tenth Eclogue, in praise of Cornelius Gallus, as a model.
"Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" is a poem written by Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1816 and published in 1817.
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The Revolt of Islam (1818) is a poem in twelve cantos composed by Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1817. The poem was originally published under the title Laon and Cythna; or, The Revolution of the Golden City: A Vision of the Nineteenth Century by Charles and James Ollier in December 1817. Shelley composed the work in the vicinity of Bisham Woods, near Great Marlow in Buckinghamshire, northwest of London, from April to September. The plot centres on two characters named Laon and Cythna, inhabitants of Argolis under Ottoman rule who initiate a revolution against its despotic ruler. Despite its title, the poem is not focused on Islam as a specific religion, though the general subject of religion is addressed, and the work draws on Orientalist archetypes and themes. The work is a symbolic parable on liberation and revolutionary idealism following the disillusionment of the French Revolution.
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History of a Six Weeks' Tour through a part of France, Switzerland, Germany, and Holland; with Letters Descriptive of a Sail Round the Lake of Geneva and of the Glaciers of Chamouni is a travel narrative by the English Romantic authors Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Published anonymously in 1817, it describes two trips taken by Mary, Percy, and Mary's stepsister, Claire Clairmont: one across Europe in 1814, and one to Lake Geneva in 1816. Divided into three sections, the text consists of a journal, four letters, and Percy Shelley's poem "Mont Blanc". Apart from the poem, preface, and two letters, the text was primarily written and organised by Mary Shelley. In 1840 she revised the journal and the letters, republishing them in a collection of Percy Shelley's writings.
Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the major English Romantic poets. American literary critic Harold Bloom describes him as "a superb craftsman, a lyric poet without rival, and surely one of the most advanced sceptical intellects ever to write a poem." A radical in his poetry as well as in his political and social views, Shelley did not achieve fame during his lifetime, but recognition of his achievements in poetry grew steadily following his death and he became an important influence on subsequent generations of poets including Robert Browning, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Thomas Hardy, and W. B. Yeats.
Michael O'Neill was an English poet and scholar, specialising in the Romantic period and post-war poetry. He published four volumes of original poetry; his academic writing was praised as "beautifully and lucidly written".
St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian: A Romance is a Gothic horror novel written by Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1810 and published by John Joseph Stockdale in December of that year, dated 1811, in London anonymously as "by a Gentleman of the University of Oxford" while the author was an undergraduate. The main character is Wolfstein, a solitary wanderer, who encounters Ginotti, an alchemist of the Rosicrucian or Rose Cross Order who seeks to impart the secret of immortality. The book was reprinted in 1822 by Stockdale and in 1840 in The Romancist and the Novelist's Library: The Best Works of the Best Authors, Vol. III, edited by William Hazlitt. The novella was a follow-up to Shelley's first prose work, Zastrozzi, published earlier in 1810. St. Irvyne was republished in 1986 by Oxford University Press as part of the World's Classics series along with Zastrozzi and in 2002 by Broadview Press.
"Fragment of a Novel" is an unfinished 1819 vampire horror story written by Lord Byron. The story, also known as "A Fragment" and "The Burial: A Fragment", was one of the first in English to feature a vampire theme. The main character was Augustus Darvell. John William Polidori based his novella The Vampyre (1819), originally attributed in print to Lord Byron, on the Byron fragment. The vampire in the Polidori story, Lord Ruthven, was modelled on Byron himself. The story was the result of the meeting that Byron had in the summer of 1816 with Percy Bysshe Shelley where a "ghost writing" contest was proposed. This contest was also what led to the creation of Frankenstein according to Percy Bysshe Shelley's 1818 Preface to the novel. The story is important in the development and evolution of the vampire story in English literature as one of the first to feature the modern vampire as able to function in society in disguise. The short story first appeared under the title "A Fragment" in the 1819 collection Mazeppa: A Poem, published by John Murray in London.
Susan J. Wolfson is Professor of English at Princeton University. She received her PhD from University of California, Berkeley and, previous to Princeton, taught for thirteen years at Rutgers University New Brunswick. Wolfson's recent books include Frankenstein: Longman Cultural Edition (2007). Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in English Romanticism and The Questioning Presence: Wordsworth, Keats, and the Interrogative Mode in Romantic Poetry ; two editions, Lord Byron: Selected Poems, co-edited with Peter Manning, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson, coedited with Barry V. Qualls, and scholarship on William Blake, S.T. Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, Mary Lamb, Lord Byron, John Keats, Felicia Hemans, Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, various topics on British Romanticism.
Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire was a poetry collection written by Percy Bysshe Shelley and his sister Elizabeth which was printed by Charles and William Phillips in Worthing and published by John Joseph Stockdale in September 1810. The work was Shelley's first published volume of poetry. Shelley wrote the poems in collaboration with his sister Elizabeth. The poems were written before Shelley entered the University of Oxford.
Epipsychidion is a major poetical work published in 1821 by Percy Bysshe Shelley. The work was subtitled: Verses addressed to the noble and unfortunate Lady Emilia V—, now imprisoned in the convent of—. The title is Greek for "concerning or about a little soul", from epi, "around", "about"; and psychidion, "little soul".
"The Cloud" is a major 1820 poem written by Percy Bysshe Shelley. "The Cloud" was written during late 1819 or early 1820, and submitted for publication on 12 July 1820. The work was published in the 1820 collection Prometheus Unbound, A Lyrical Drama, in Four Acts, With Other Poems by Charles and James Ollier in London in August 1820. The work was proof-read by John Gisborne. There were multiple drafts of the poem. The poem consists of six stanzas in anapestic or antidactylus meter, a foot with two unaccented syllables followed by an accented syllable.
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