Shelley and the Marriage Question

This essay is written to share the author's perspective on what Percy Bysshe Shelley's perspective on marriage is. Shelley was one of the major English Romantic poets. A radical in his poetry as well as in his political and social views, Shelley did not achieve fame during his lifetime, but recognition of his achievements in poetry grew steadily following his death and he became an important influence on subsequent generations of poets including Robert Browning, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Thomas Hardy, and W. B. Yeats. Shelley's advocacy of free love drew heavily on the work of Mary Wollstonecraft and the early work of William Godwin. In his notes to Queen Mab, he wrote: «A system could not well have been devised more studiously hostile to human happiness than marriage.» He argued that the children of unhappy marriages «are nursed in a systematic school of ill-humor, violence and falsehood». He believed that the ideal of chastity outside marriage was «a monkish and evangelical superstition» which led to the hypocrisy of prostitution and promiscuity.