Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) was an English Romantic poet and radical thinker, author of Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark, Prometheus Unbound and Adonais. A rebel against tyranny and convention, married to Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, he drowned off the Italian coast at twenty-nine.
Works
Rosalind and Helen, A Modern Eclogue; with Other Poems, Prometheus Unbound, with Other Poems
The rebel heir
Shelley was born in 1792 at Field Place, Sussex, heir to a baronetcy and a large fortune. Bullied at Eton, he became fascinated by science and the occult. At University College, Oxford, he wrote with a friend a provocative pamphlet on religion, for which both were expelled in 1811.
The same year he eloped with Harriet Westbrook, a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl, and quarrelled with his father. He threw himself into radical causes, distributing pamphlets in Dublin for Irish emancipation and publishing Queen Mab, a visionary poem attacking tyranny.
Mary and Italy
In 1814 Shelley left Harriet for Mary Godwin, daughter of the philosophers William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, and travelled with her across Europe. In 1816 they spent the summer by Lake Geneva with Lord Byron. After Harriet's suicide later that year, Shelley married Mary.
Denied custody of his children by Harriet, and pursued by scandal and debts, Shelley left England for Italy in 1818. There, in four years, he wrote his greatest works: Prometheus Unbound, The Cenci, Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark, and Adonais, an elegy for Keats.
The last voyage
In 1822 the Shelleys lived at Lerici, on the Gulf of La Spezia. On 8 July, sailing back from Livorno in his small boat, the Don Juan, Shelley was caught in a storm with his friend Edward Williams and a boy; all three drowned. His body was washed ashore ten days later.
Following quarantine laws, his body was cremated on the beach near Viareggio in the presence of Byron and Leigh Hunt. His ashes were buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, near Keats. His Defence of Poetry, published after his death, ends by calling poets the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
Anecdotes
The heart that would not burn
During the cremation of Shelley's body on the beach, his friend Edward Trelawny pulled the heart from the flames. It was given to Mary Shelley, and after her death in 1851 it was found among her belongings, wrapped in a page of Adonais.
A sonnet contest
Ozymandias was written in 1817 in a friendly competition with the poet Horace Smith, who wrote his own sonnet on the same subject, the ruined statue of the Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II. Both were published in The Examiner a few weeks apart.
Frequently asked questions
What are Shelley's most famous poems?
Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark, The Masque of Anarchy, Prometheus Unbound and Adonais.
How did Shelley die?
He drowned on 8 July 1822 when his sailing boat sank in a storm off the coast of Tuscany. He was twenty-nine.
Who was Shelley's wife?
Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, whom he married in 1816.