Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) was an English Romantic poet known for his lyrical intensity, political radicalism, and visionary imagination. Born into a wealthy Sussex family, he attended Eton and briefly studied at University College, Oxford, but was expelled in 1811 after publishing a pamphlet advocating atheism. Shelley rejected conventional religion, monarchy, social inequality, and restrictive sexual morality. His early life was marked by scandal: he eloped with Harriet Westbrook in 1811, later separated from her, and began a relationship with Mary Godwin, daughter of the philosopher William Godwin and the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft. Shelley and Mary, later Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, married in 1816 after Harriet’s death. Much of Shelley’s major work was written during periods of exile in Italy. His poems include “Ozymandias,” “Ode to the West Wind,” “To a Skylark,” “Adonais,” “The Mask of Anarchy,” Prometheus Unbound, and The Cenci. His writing combines idealism, skepticism, natural imagery, and demands for political and spiritual liberation. Shelley died at the age of twenty-nine when his boat, the Don Juan, sank in a storm off the coast of Italy near La Spezia. Though little appreciated by the general public during his lifetime, he became one of the most influential poets in English literature, admired for the musical power and intellectual ambition of his verse.
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