Though life in Italy had its obvious rewards, this period was by no means one of undiluted happiness for Shelley. He was increasingly anxious about his health; he was beginning to resent the social ostracism that had made him an exile; exile itself was at times hard to bear, even though the political and social situation in England was most unattractive; and his son William died in June 1819. However, although a note of despondency can be perceived in some of his minor poems, such as the Stanzas Written in Dejection near Naples, the major ventures of Shelley's later years testify to the relentless energy of an imaginative mind steadily concerned with fundamentals and ever eager to diversify its modes of expression. In Prometheus Unbound (1818-1819), Shelley turned to mythical drama to convey, in a more sensitive and complex way, the basic truth that had been expressed through the narrative technique of The Revolt of Islam. Moreover, the same dialectical reconciliation of the puzzling dualities of life received more purely lyrical shape in the Ode to the West Wind of October 1819. Dramas and Social Tracts

Like the other romantic poets, Shelley was aware of the limitations of lyrical poetry as a medium of mass communication. He, too, endeavored to convey his message to a larger audience, and he experimented with stage drama in The Cenci (1819), a lurid but carefully constructed tragedy which illustrates the havoc wrought by man's Jupiterian lust for power, both physical and mental, in the sphere of domestic life. Shelley's interest, however, lay in wider issues, which he now began to tackle in unexpectedly robust satires and with scathing polemical aggressiveness, venting his social indignation in the stirring oratory of The Masque of Anarchy (1819); in Peter Bell the Third (1819), a parody of William Wordsworth and an ironic comment on the elder poet's political and artistic disintegration; in Oedipus Tyrannus, or Swell-foot the Tyrant (1820), a mock tragedy on the royal family; and in Hellas (1821). The last of his major political poems, Hellas celebrates the Greek war of liberation, in which Lord Byron was involved in more active ways; it crowns a large series of minor poems in which Shelley, throughout his writing career, had hailed the resurgent spirit of liberty, not only among the oppressed classes of England but also among the oppressed nations of the world.