Percy Bysshe Shelley

Do you believe in the dark faeries? Percy Bysshe Shelley was a well known poet who wrote in the romantic style. In American Lit for the past few weeks, we have been researching romantic poets. Something I found interesting about Shelley, was that his first important poem, had been about Queen Mab. In general, she is a well known dark being. The use of her name as the title,made me wonder: Why her? When I analyzed the poem more closly, I found some connections to his life. Shelley had two wives. The first one committed suicide, after he traveled to France with another woman. In his poem, he personifies Death and Sleep as if they were actually people. I found that you could easily replace the two names with his wives names because the characteristics describes them each induvidually. One of the questions that I had was: Do you think that he wrote the poem Queen Mab with inspiration of his own life, mainly his wives? When I looked up Queen Mab, the most common pop-up said that she was commonly defined as a depiction of the plague or even herpes. This was because she was mainly drawn over a body, whose lips were covered in boils. Do you think that had anything to do with Shelley's choice to use her as his title?