We think we know Shelley. It is safe to say that we do not.

He comes to most of us in neatly packaged school anthologies which safely repeat the classics (Ozymandias, To a Skylark, and Ode to the West Wind), but Shelley's verse like The Masque of Anarchy shaped the world. Shelley and his two companions drowned off the coast of Italy after their boat ran into difficulties and sank. He was only 29 but he left a body of work which endures. With the bicentenary of his premature death in July 2022, there has never been a better time to re-examine Shelley's enduring legacy.

Benjamin Zephaniah is a huge admirer of Shelley. After a terrible start with the poet at school when the teacher told him he was stupid for not fully understanding what he was reading, Benjamin was turned on to Shelley in his early 20s when he stumbled on a copy of Paul Foot’s 'Red Shelley'. Paul Foot put Shelley’s works into the historical context in which they were written, in the early 19th century, at a time of profound social and political instability.

Understanding the context enabled Benjamin to connect with the radical nature of Shelley and his work. He says, "As a young, angry black man in the 1980s, it was a revelation to find a dead white poet that made sense to me. Good poetry has no age, and no colour." What he found in Shelley changed his life. Benjamin discovered that the poem he had first encountered at school, The Mask of Anarchy, was an angry ballad written by Shelley in response to the Peterloo massacre, and he now has a lifelong attachment to that poem.

Benjamin takes us on his journey from his first encounters with Shelley all the way up to the present: as he looks at a small keepsake of Shelley’s ashes, alleged to have been collected from the beach near Viareggio where Shelley's body was cremated, now held at the British Library, Benjamin says it's the closest he will get to a 'spiritual experience'.

Along the way, Benjamin meets experts and enthusiasts to discover more about what made Shelley tick and to breathe life into his poetry, showing that it's as relevant now as it was when Shelley died 200 years ago.

With Ben Okri, Nora Crook; Richard Holmes; Bysshe Coffey; Will Bowers, Alexander Lock and John Webster.

Featured Poems: The Masque of Anarchy; Ode to the West Wind

Series Producer: Melissa FitzGerald
Sound Design: David Thomas
Series Consultant: Bysshe Coffey (author of Shelley's Broken World, 2021)

A Blakeway production for BBC Radio 4 Show less