Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley

1792–1822

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) was an English Romantic poet, born in Sussex. Expelled from Oxford for a pamphlet on atheism, he became a radical in politics and religion. He married Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, the author of Frankenstein, and spent his last years in Italy.

His best-known short poems include “Ozymandias”, “Ode to the West Wind”, “To a Skylark” and “Love’s Philosophy”; longer works include Prometheus Unbound and Adonais, his elegy for Keats. His essay A Defence of Poetry ends with the claim that poets are “the unacknowledged legislators of the world”. He drowned off the Italian coast at 29.

Best-known poems

All poems (46)

A 2

E 1

F 1

H 2

I 1

L 4

M 2

N 1

O 2

P 1

R 1

S 2

T 13

V 1

W 1

In French 3

In German 4

In Hungarian 2

In Italian 1

In Spanish 1

Poets of the same era

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 1807–1882 Alfred, Lord Tennyson 1809–1892 Lord Byron 1788–1824 Robert Browning 1812–1889 William Wordsworth 1770–1850 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 1806–1861 John Greenleaf Whittier 1807–1892 William Cullen Bryant 1794–1878