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s not very happy, for he was by nature revolutionary and unconventional. He was known as “mad shelly” and astronomy, and the exciting experiments he conducted, gave rise to many stories. The persecutions which he endured and witnessed at school gave him a lifelong detestation of tyranny and violence. Shelley went to Oxford full of plans and ideas for changing the system of society. Being convinced that religious faiths were harmful to man’s happiness, he and his friend T.J.HoggH put forth a small study in logic, called the Necessity of Altheism, which was objected by the Oxford authorities , however, shelly and Hogg declined to discuss the matter. As a result they were sent off. It was a disaster for a boy at 18, for he lost a valuable Education at Oxford. He fell out with his father and became a wan-darer. Though he would eventually inherit a fortune, he had no ready money. When he was 19, he eloped with Harriet Westbrook, a girl of 16 whom he scarcely knew. From Then on, shelly, always full of schemes, went on a quixotic expedition to redress the wrongs of the Irish; from Lyn mouth shortly afterwards he distributed a seditious pamphlet called the rights of man, scattering some copies by balloon and putting others into bottles and throwing them into the sea. In 1813 he printed and published extraordinary poem, Queen Mab privately which expressed his belief in a new golden age. In his glorification of revolutionary ideas, Shelley had sought out William Godwin, author of political justice, who had married Mary Wollstonecraft, author of The Rights of Women. His marriage with Harriet proved a complete failure; Shelly eloped with Godwin’s 15-year-old daughter Mary. But that year Harriet was found drowned in the serpentine and her two children by shelly became the subject of a lawsuit. For Shelley, he was not only deeply shocked by the tragedy but also suffered the bitterness of losing his children. However, the life had to go on. To get rid of solitude, he married Mary Godwin later at Marlow, on the Thames. There, in 1816, he wrote Ablator, or the Spirit of Solitude, the first long poem to show his true genius. Next year he wrote a long imaginative poem on liberty and love, the Revolt of Islam, which contained many fine passages ofdescription and narrative and was inspired by the French Revolution. At that time, Shelly had become a friend of Leigh Hunt and Peacock and had met Keats. Finally in 1818, to escape prejudice and insult, and also Godwin’s constant demands for money, Shelley decided to seek peace in Italy. There shelly gave up his dream of reforming the world by the means of direct political action and decided to pass on his inspiration to others through his poetry. In this belief he composed his Prometheus Unbound, enjoyed for its incomparable music, its color and story, as well as because it contained Shelly’s noblest ideas. To this period, too, he wrote his Lines in the Eugenia Hills and Julian and Maddalo, an autobiographical poem based on a happy visit to Byron in VeniceH. Meanwhile Shelly wrote his finest lyric, such as the Cloud, the Skylark, the Ode to the West Wind and so on. The music and intensity showed that Shelly was entering on a new stage of personal and imaginative greatness. B. The Background of Ode to the West Wind The poem was composed in 1819 when European labor movement and the revolutionary movement surged. To fight for their right, British working class began to struggle with the bourgeoisie. At