The Mask of Anarchy: a Reflection of Shelley's Revolutionary.
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was the only son of an aristocratic family: his father was an M.P. and his grandfather was a wealthy landowner. He educated at Eton College and entered the University of Oxford. There, he was expelled because of his pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism, suggesting that the existence of God remained unproven by physical evidence or reason.
At school, Shelley became interested in the revolutionary political and philosophical ideas of Thomas Paine and William Godwin, radical political writers. Throughout his life, he emphatically expressed his political and religious views in a struggle against social injustice, often to the point where it got him into trouble or mired in controversy.
Later, in Italy, after he had lost his wife, Mary, and his 3 children, he began to accept his self-imposed exile, as he branded as an immoralist, an atheist and political subversive by British opinion.
Due to his revolutionary ideals, which he had manifested in his poetry, he was considered a non-conformist, an atheist and a subversive and dangerous immoralist. The reason why he gained such labels was that he was, radically, against political and religious institutions: government, Christianity, and marriage. He also opposed to the ideas of God's existence, aristocracy, and customs.
However, our close observation reveals his belief in humanitarian principle. That is, he had strong convictions in the power of human love and reason, the perfectibility and ultimate progress of man and the power of the human mind to change circumstances for the better. According to these beliefs, we can imply that that Shelly advocated the spirit of revolution and the power of free thought.
His motivation in writing poetry derived from these revolutionary ideas as well as "his consciousness of his duty as an artist in the immense and fiery process of social change of which he knew himself to be part-, according to Richard Holmes.
