Melinda Jane Harrison

Aug 4, 2025

Happy Birthday Percy B Shelley! August 4, 1792

It's Percy B. Shelley's Birthday today, a day I ALWAYS celebrate. I've been lying in bed this morning, composing in my head a post and tribute to this polymathic genius that I adore and who is my number #1 influence since I was a sixteen year old girl. Of course, I lay there long enough to where the post turned into a small paper, some of it filled with pithy comments on those in his circle. No film has ever captured him correctly. His critics are often foolish and biased, especially those who see him as cruel, sexist, and misogynistic. How absurd. He was a young man, brilliant, and way ahead of his time. A man of our current time. No other Romantic poet is so fitting for the 21st century. It literally breaks my heart that he died before he was 30 years old. I am not one to believe in so called "destiny" but the moment Percy B set foot in Geneva in 1816, a series of events were set in motion that would lead to his drowning in 1822. Lilliputian ties and I can trace them in my mind as I did this morning, lying there in bed. I suppose out of all his circle, I adore Claire Clairmont and Thomas Peacock the most, the rest all deserve my contempt (I even give that grudgingly) and this morning I recounted their sins in my head for hours and that includes Mary Shelley, who out of guilt and desperation, slaved over compiling an edition of his poems until she had a nervous breakdown, one of the many she already had experienced. I pity her. I do. But she was Godwin's true daughter and if you don't know what that means, go read about Godwin. Shelley, himself, made two serious mistakes, and they both concerned his so-called marriages, something he never believed in or held to and it cost him. And he paid the ultimate price. Of the two, Harriet Westbrook is the one that haunted him emotionally. It is easy to see how all that happened, when ones considers Shelley's nasty upbringing with a neglectful mother and sadistic father, where the poet's only emotional respite was the adoration and love of his sisters. This pattern never left his emotional make-up. It ruled him. He was flawed, of course, but he was genuine and warm and generous and good. I feel so blessed to know his work, to understand his life, and to feel his visions. To share those visions. I was one of those women who was a prisoner, too, until his work freed me to see the world very differently, to embrace independent thought and skepticism and live in doubt and uncertainty with the grace that he possessed. What an incredible human being. I am not into mythmaking and I make none of him. I am team Human. He was human. That's enough.