Percy Bysshe Shelley was a poet of what the critic Harold Bloom called ‘The Internalization of Quest-Romance’: ‘The poet takes the patterns of quest-romance and transposes them into his own imaginative life.’ In Shelley’s first important poem and his masterpiece, respectively, we find one doomed and one successful quest for what a psychologist might call eudaemonic well-being, also known as happiness. If you’re inclined towards emo-core and the Gothic, you might like Alastor:
It is a woe too ‘deep for tears,’ when all Is reft at once, when some surpassing Spirit, Whose light adorned the world around it, leaves Those who remain behind, not sobs or groans, The passionate tumult of a clinging hope; But pale despair and cold tranquillity, Nature’s vast frame, the web of human things, Birth and the grave, that are not as they were. (713–20)
But life in Shelley Court surely has more in common with the paradise of a redeemed world described at the end of Prometheus Unbound:
The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains, Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed: — but man: Equal, unclassed, tribeless and nationless, Exempt from awe, worship, degree, — the King Over himself; just, gentle, wise: — but man: Passionless? no — yet free from guilt or pain, Which were, for his will made, or suffered them, Nor yet exempt, though ruling them like slaves, From chance, and death, and mutability, The clogs of that which else might oversoar The loftiest star of unascended Heaven, Pinnacled dim in the intense inane. (III. iv. 193–204)
Shelley was born near Horsham, Sussex in 1792 and drowned off the Italian coast, at the age of twenty-nine, in 1822. In many ways he, with Byron, is what we expect of the Romantic, the one who wrestles with consciousness, lives dangerously, and dies young. His fellow poet Robert Browning paid him tribute by saying, ‘Whatever Shelley was, he was with an admirable sincerity.’