🇬🇧Percy Bysshe
Shelley

He was expelled from Oxford University in March 1811 — at the age of eighteen — for refusing to deny authorship of a pamphlet entitled "The Necessity of Atheism." The pamphlet was not a work of great sophistication; it was a brisk, logical argument that belief in God could not be sustained by rational evidence. But the act of writing it, publishing it, and then refusing to recant when summoned before the college authorities was entirely characteristic of the Percy Bysshe Shelley who would spend the next eleven years producing some of the most politically radical, formally ambitious, and lyrically beautiful poetry in the English language. He was permanently in rebellion — against religious authority, against political tyranny, against social convention, against his own class — and his rebellion produced art.

Percy Bysshe Shelley was born on August 4, 1792, in Field Place, Horsham, Sussex, the eldest son of a wealthy baronet. He attended Eton College from 1804, where he was bullied for his refusal to submit to the hierarchical culture of fagging and was known as "Mad Shelley" for his alchemical experiments and gothic enthusiasms. He read voraciously — philosophy, science, political theory — and began writing at school: his first novel, Zastrozzi, a Gothic tale of revenge, was published in 1810 when he was seventeen. At University College, Oxford, he met Thomas Jefferson Hogg, who became his closest friend. Together they produced "The Necessity of Atheism." Both were expelled. Shelley's father gave him an allowance on the condition he have no contact with Hogg; Shelley immediately wrote to Hogg.

That summer, in a characteristically impulsive act, the nineteen-year-old Shelley eloped to Scotland with Harriet Westbrook, a sixteen-year-old schoolfellow of his sisters whom he barely knew but whose apparent need for rescue from a tyrannical father appealed to his reforming instincts. He was writing constantly: political pamphlets advocating Catholic emancipation and Irish independence, philosophical essays, and the long poem Queen Mab (1813), a visionary denunciation of religion, monarchy, commerce, and meat-eating that would influence English radical politics for decades. He was twenty years old. He had also met William Godwin, the political philosopher whose work had shaped his thinking, and fallen in love with Godwin's sixteen-year-old daughter Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. In 1814, he left Harriet — who was pregnant with their second child — and eloped with Mary to the Continent. He never returned to Harriet; she drowned herself in the Serpentine in 1816.

Shelley married Mary Godwin in December 1816, weeks after Harriet's death and immediately after the death of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's half-sister Fanny Imlay. The couple moved to Italy in 1818, where they would remain for the rest of Shelley's life. The Italian years were enormously productive. In 1818 and 1819 he wrote "Ozymandias," his most famous sonnet, in a sonnet-writing competition with his friend Horace Smith; "Ode to the West Wind," one of the great lyric poems in the language, composed in a wood outside Florence; and the entirety of Prometheus Unbound (1820), his masterpiece — a lyrical drama in four acts depicting the liberation of the Titan Prometheus from Jupiter's tyranny, an extended allegory of human freedom and the overthrow of oppression. He also wrote "To a Skylark" and "The Mask of Anarchy," a political poem written in response to the Peterloo Massacre, which called on the oppressed to resist their oppressors with passive resistance — anticipating Gandhi by a century.

Shelley died on July 8, 1822, ten days before his thirtieth birthday. He had been sailing his schooner, the Don Juan, across the Gulf of Spezia with two friends when a storm struck. The boat sank. His body was found ten days later on the beach near Viareggio. At his cremation on the beach — organized by Lord Byron and their mutual friend Edward Trelawny — Trelawny is said to have plucked Shelley's heart from the flames. Mary Shelley kept it, wrapped in a copy of "Adonais," Shelley's elegy for Keats, until her own death. He was twenty-nine years old and had been writing seriously for barely a decade.

The scope of Shelley's ambition — intellectual, political, and poetic — was extraordinary. He was not merely a lyric poet of great talent; he was a systematic thinker about the role of poetry in political and social transformation. His essay "A Defence of Poetry" (1821) argued that poets were the "unacknowledged legislators of the world" — that imaginative literature was the engine of moral and political progress. The phrase has become a cliche, but the argument behind it is serious and has continued to provoke serious response. His influence on subsequent radical political poetry, from the Chartists to Shelley's Victorian admirers to the twentieth century protest tradition, is continuous and profound.