Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792–1822)

English lyric poet and critic. He was a commanding figure of the artistic movement of Romanticism. His skill in poetic form and metre and his intellectual capacity and searching mind were clouded by his rebellious nature and his notorious moral nonconformity. He fought against religion and for political freedom. This is reflected in his early poems such as Queen Mab (1813). He later wrote tragedies including The Cenci (1818), lyric dramas such as Prometheus Unbound (1820), and lyric poems such as ‘Ode to the West Wind’.

Born near Horsham, Sussex, he was educated at Eton and University College, Oxford, where his collaboration in a pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism (1811) caused his expulsion. While living in London he fell in love with 16-year-old Harriet Westbrook, whom he married in 1811. He visited Ireland and Wales, writing pamphlets defending vegetarianism and political freedom, and in 1813 published privately Queen Mab, a poem with political freedom as its theme. Meanwhile he had become estranged from his wife and in 1814 left England with the English writer Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, whom he married after Harriet drowned herself in 1816 (see Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley). Alastor, written in 1815, was followed by the epic The Revolt of Islam. By 1818 Shelley was living in Italy where he produced The Cenci; the satire on English poet William Wordsworth, Peter Bell the Third (1819); and Prometheus Unbound. Other works of the period are ‘Ode to the West Wind’ (1819); ‘The Cloud’ and ‘The Skylark’ (both 1820); ‘The Sensitive Plant’ and ‘The Witch of Atlas’; ‘Epipsychidion’ and, on the death of the English poet John Keats, ‘Adonais’ (1821); the lyric drama Hellas (1822); and the prose Defence of Poetry (1821). In 1816, the Shelleys stayed beside Lake Geneva, Italy, with English writer Lord Byron, and their friendship continued until Percy Shelley's death by drowning while sailing in Italy in July 1822. His ashes were buried in Rome.