Happy b-day, wildman Percy Bysshe Shelley

It is the birthday of poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792), who wrote some of the most  popular poems in the English language, including Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind, and To a Skylark, though his greatest success came after his death.

Scholars say it was Shelley's unorthodox lifestyle that limited the acceptance of his writing to a rather small circle of friends. At Oxford, Shelley wrote two gothic novels  and read extensively, though it is said he didn't go to class often.

He wrote a pamphlet with a fellow student defending atheism, earning him the scorn of the college administration when he refused to deny that he wrote it. He and his fellow student, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, were expelled. Shelley's father intervened and won him a chance to reenter Oxford if he would state that what he wrote was untrue. He refused, earning him the scorn of his father.

At 19, Shelley eloped with a 16-year-old student from a boarding school, only to abandon her three years later, when she was pregnant with their second child, to run away to Switzerland with the 16-year-old daughter of a writer friend. Mary Godwin was more Shelley's intellectual equal. Later, Shelley's first wife committed suicide and he and Mary were married.

In 1818, Percy and Mary, and her stepsister Claire Clairmont, lived in Italy, where he wrote the lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound, which was based on  a Greek trilogy whose title character steals the secret fire to help mankind progress, only to be punished by Zeus, king of the Olympian gods. Shelley's play was never intended to be performed, only read.

It wasn't until several generations after his death that Shelley became widely accepted. He was admired by the later Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite poets, and by such diverse luminaries as Isadora Duncan, Thomas Hardy, Karl Marx, Bertrand Russell, George Bernard Shaw, Sinclair Lewis, and Oscar Wilde.

Happy birthday, poet John Keats

It is the birthday of English Romantic poet John Keats (1795), whose immense talent places him as a peer of the most beloved English poets, Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Keats died of TB in Rome at age 25. Here is a reading of Keats' famous Ode to a Grecian Urn by English book editor Hedley Grenfell-Banks.

Happy birthday, Mary (Frankenstein) Shelley

It is the birthday of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797), who created one of the most beloved monsters of all time in her gothic novel Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818). Shelley also wrote Mathilda (1959), a story of incest and suicide. She also edited the works of her husband, poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Here is the story of how Frankenstein got written, delightfully told by Jack Perkins.

Happy birthday, Countee Cullen

It is the birthday of poet Countee Cullen (1903), one of the most celebrated poets of the Harlem Renaissance. His name was pronounced "Coun-tay." One of his best known poems is Yet Do I Marvel, the last line of which reads: "Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:/To make a poet black, and bid him sing!" Cullen published several poetry collections, including Color (1925), Harlem Wine (1926), Copper Sun (1927), The Ballad of the Brown Girl (1927), and The Black Christ and Other Poems (1929). Cullen wrote a novel, One Way to Heaven (1932)  and an autobiography of his cat, My Lives and How I Lost Them (1942). Cullen emulated John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, and was influenced by William Wordsworth and William Blake.

Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein

Mary Shelley

It is the birthday of English writer Mary Shelley (1797), who is best remembered as the author of the novel Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) and as the devoted wife of poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, whose work she promoted long after his death.

Following scholarly research in the 1970s and 1980s, Mary Shelley has come to be regarded as a major literary figure of the Romantic period and an early feminist author.

In 1816, Mary Godwin, Shelley, their illegitimate son, and her half-sister, left England to spend the summer with poet George Lord Byron and his physician at a manor near Lake Geneva in Switzerland. It rained incessantly and the group was confined to the house for days.

They discussed literature, kept diaries, wrote poems and stories. Soon they were engaged in a contest to see who could come up with the scariest story. Mary Godwin wrote a tale about a scientist obsessed with bringing inanimate bodies to life, and an experiment gone horribly wrong. She intended it only as a short story  but Shelley and the others were so intrigued they encouraged her to expand it as a novel. it became her first (and most successful) and it was published two years later.

Mary Godwin and Shelley were married after the suicide of his first wife. Mary devoted many years to developing Shelley's reputation as a poet and promoting his work. Though he was known throughout England during his lifetime, most recognition did not come until after his death.

Mary Shelley continued to write and publish throughout her life, and published several books after her husband's untimely death in a storm at sea in 1822. She edited collections Shelley's poetry, including Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1824). Among her novels are Mathilda (1819), in which a woman on her deathbed tells of her father's incest and suicide;  and The Last Man (1826), a science fiction tale of the survivors of a plague-ridden world.

Percy Bysshe Shelley was a bad boy

Percy Bysshe Shelley

It is the birthday of poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792), who wrote some of the most  popular poems in the English language, including Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind, and To a Skylark, though his greatest success came after his death.

Scholars say it was Shelley's unorthodox lifestyle that limited the acceptance of his writing to a rather small circle of friends. At Oxford, Shelley wrote two gothic novels  and read extensively, though it is said he didn't go to class often.

He wrote a pamphlet with a fellow student defending atheism, earning him the scorn of the college administration when he refused to deny that he wrote it. He and his fellow student, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, were expelled. Shelley's father intervened and won him a chance to reenter Oxford if he would state that what he wrote was untrue. He refused, earning him the scorn of his father.

At 19, Shelley eloped with a 16-year-old student from a boarding school, only to abandon her three years later, when she was pregnant with their second child, to run away to Switzerland with the 16-year-old daughter of a writer friend. Mary Godwin was more Shelley's intellectual equal. Later, Shelley's first wife committed suicide and he and Mary were married.

In 1818, Percy and Mary, and her stepsister Claire Clairmont, lived in Italy, where he wrote the lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound, which was based on  a Greek trilogy whose title character steals the secret fire to help mankind progress, only to be punished by Zeus, king of the Olympian gods. Shelley's play was never intended to be performed, only read.

It wasn't until several generations after his death that Shelley became widely accepted. He was admired by the later Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite poets, and by such diverse luminaries as Isadora Duncan, Thomas Hardy, Karl Marx, Bertrand Russell, George Bernard Shaw, Sinclair Lewis, and Oscar Wilde.

W.B. Yeats won Nobel Prize for Literature

William Butler Yeats

It is the birthday of Irish poet and playwright William Butler Yeats (1865), whose body of work representing Irish literature won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. He was one of the founders of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, which featured the work of Irish playwrights. Yeats was closely associated with the Irish Literary Renaissance, the revival of Irish literature in the late 19th and early 20th century and he is considered a leading figure in 20th century English-language literature. Some scholars consider Yeats to be representative of the transition between the centuries, similar to the way Picasso represented the transition to modern art. Still, Yeats work has little in common with such modernists Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. For a time, Pound served as secretary to Yeats. Early in his life Yeats fell in love with ardent Irish nationalist Maud Gonne. However, she turned down his proposals several times and ended up marrying someone else. They maintained a lifelong relationship. When he was 51, Yeats proposed to, Georgie Hyde-Lees, the 25-year-old friend of one of his old flames. They were married until his death in 1939 and produced two children. Yeats was fascinated with mysticism and the occult for most of his life, and he and Georgie experimented with "automatic writing," which is claimed to be influenced by  spiritual sources. Yeats is known for his use of symbolism in his work. His early writing was influenced by Percy Bysshe Shelly, Edmund Spenser, and William Blake. His poetry collections include The Wild Swans at Coole (1919), Michael Robares and the Dancer (1921), The Tower (1928), The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933), and Last Poems and Plays (1940). Among his plays are The Countess Cathleen (1892), The Land of Heart's Desire (1894), Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), The King's Threshold (1904), and Deirdre (1907).

Countee Cullen, Harlem Renaissance poet

Countee Cullen

It is the birthday of poet Countee Cullen (1903), who came to prominence during the Harlem Renaissance. He started writing poetry in high school, where he helped edit the school literary magazine and served as editor of the school newspaper. He began at New York University in 1921, where he wrote most of the poems that appeared in his first three poetry volumes, Color (1925), Copper Sun (1927) and The Ballad of the Brown Girl (1927). He was known for writing in a style that emulated John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley—sonnets and quatrains and so forth. He also was influenced by William Wordsworth and William Blake. He won several prizes for poetry during the 1920s, including one from the Urban League's Opportunity magazine, for which he served as an editor. He was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and entered Harvard in 1925, where he earned a masters degree. In 1928, he married Yolande Du Bois, daughter of W.E.B. Du Bois, in a lavish wedding but the marriage lasted only two years. Later he taught French at Frederick Douglass Junior High School in New York. He died at the age of 42. Among his best known poems is Yet Do I Marvel: I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind/And did He stoop to quibble could tell why/The little buried mole continues blind,/Why flesh that mirrors Him must someday die,/Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus/Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare/If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus/To struggle up a never-ending stair./Inscrutable His ways are, and immune/To catechism by a mind too strewn/With petty cares to slightly understand/What awful brains compels His awful hand./Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:/To make a poet black, and bid him sing!

For Mother’s Day, a tribute …

Felicia Hemans

Felicia Hemans was a single working mother who raised five children by herself. What’s more, she supported her family writing poetry -- in the early 19th century.

That she would write poetry throughout her life was probably inevitable. She was a precocious child, homeschooled by her mother, and became fluent in Latin, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and French, as well as English, by the time she was a teenager. Later, she taught herself German. She wrote poetry from an early age.

Family was very important to her, and though her father abandoned the family, she remained close to her mother and her brothers. She was the fifth of seven children. Her father was a successful merchant but lost his fortune in an economic downturn. The family moved from her birthplace in Liverpool to a naturally beautiful region of northern Wales. Shortly after their move, her father went to Canada to try to regain his fortune, but he failed to do so and died in Quebec, without ever seeing his family again.

 The natural countryside in Wales was the perfect setting to inspire young Felicia. She was at home there.

She memorized long passages from the Bible and the work of contemporary poets, and entertained her family with recitations. She also wrote poetry, and when she was 15, her family published her first book,  a slim volume called Poems.

She was a beautiful young teenager, and this, along with her poetical talent, drew the attention of young Percy Bysshe Shelley, who started writing her letters. Felicia's mother didn’t approve of Shelley and discouraged the relationship.

When she was about 14, Felicia became enamored with a handsome army officer who was as friend of her older brother. Her brother served with the young man in the Peninsula War against Napoleon III. Within a year or so, Felicia and Capt. Alfred Hemans were engaged, but as Felicia's mother disapproved of this relationship as well, Felicia delayed a wedding. Finally, when Felicia was 19, her mother relented and the couple was married.

Felicia’s third book, Domestic Affections and Other Poems, was published shortly before the wedding. It examined the woman’s place in the home and some say it idealized domestic bliss. In any case, it was perfect for the Victorian era in which she lived.

For the next six years, Felicia had babies and wrote poetry. She published three more books. Capt. Heman was discharged from the army and only received half the pay he had received on active duty. To make ends meet, the family moved in with Felicia’s mother.

Felicia was pregnant with their fifth son when Alfred abandoned the family and moved to Italy, ostensibly to recover from an illness. Scholars think the couple just separated. Felicia never visited her husband and they rarely exchanged letters. In any case, she never saw him again.

For the next nine years, Felicia raised her boys and focused on her writing when she could, though it was a struggle finding the peace and quiet necessary for concentration in a household of rambunctious youngsters. She wrote to her sister “When you talk of tranaquility and a quiet home, I stare about in wonder, having almost lost the recollection of such things.”

Felicia did find a place of refuge, however. She wrote her favorite poem, The Forest Sanctuary, in the laundry room.

She wrote relentlessly and of necessity, pursuing anything that would bring in income, including songs, translations and magazine articles. She also tried her hand at writing plays. Her first, The Vespers of Palermo, was produced in Edinburgh and Covent Garden in London. She was paid 200 guineas. But the play failed to find a following and closed. She tried twice more but those efforts failed too, and she gave up playwriting.

Still, her poetry was very popular both in Great Britain and the United States. She grew in prominence and was acknowledged as a serious poet during her lifetime. In all, 19 books of her work were published during her lifetime. One of the most popular was Records of Woman: With Other Poems. A copy of the American edition published in 1828 is in the collection of rare and unusual books at Lighthouse Books, ABAA.

Felicia Hemans died in 1835 at the age of 41.