Lecture The 19th century literature. Romanticism

Percy Bysshe Shelley ['pɜ:si 'biʃ 'ʃeli] is best known for poems such as Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark, Music, When Soft Voices Die. Shelley was an atheist, a radical thinker and a marginal. He was expelled from Oxford. His close circle of admirers, however, included the most progressive thinkers of the day. Shelley became an idol of the next three or four generations of poets. Shelley's influential poem The Masque of Anarchy (1819) calls for nonviolence in protest and political action. It is perhaps the first modern statement of the principle of nonviolent protest. Mahatma Gandhi's passive resistance was influenced and inspired by Shelley's verse, and Gandhi would often quote the poem to vast audiences.