🪴 GoDeep
Search
← University Challenge
Portrait of Percy Bysshe Shelley

Literature · Poets

Percy Bysshe Shelley

1792–1822 · English

Romanticism

Percy Bysshe Shelley was a radical Romantic poet, atheist and political idealist, expelled from Oxford for The Necessity of Atheism. His lyrics such as Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind and To a Skylark, and longer works like Prometheus Unbound and Adonais, made him one of the major English poets. Married to Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, he drowned off the Italian coast in 1822, a month before his 30th birthday.

How to spot them

  • ▸Ozymandias: 'Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
  • ▸Ode to the West Wind: 'If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?'
  • ▸Expelled from Oxford for The Necessity of Atheism (1811)
  • ▸Husband of Mary Shelley; drowned in the Gulf of La Spezia in 1822
  • ▸'Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world' (A Defence of Poetry)

Key works

Ozymandias (1818)

Sonnet on the ruined statue of a pharaoh in the desert, written in competition with Horace Smith

Ode to the West Wind (1820 (written 1819))

Ode in terza rima stanzas invoking the wind as destroyer and preserver

To a Skylark (1820)

Lyric beginning 'Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!'

Prometheus Unbound (1820)

Lyrical drama in which Prometheus is freed and tyranny overthrown

Adonais (1821)

Pastoral elegy on the death of John Keats

The Masque of Anarchy (1832 (written 1819))

Protest poem on the Peterloo Massacre: 'Ye are many, they are few'

A Defence of Poetry (1840 (written 1821))

Essay ending with poets as 'the unacknowledged legislators of the world'

The Cenci (1819)

Verse tragedy of incest and parricide in Renaissance Rome

Key ideas

  • Poetry and imagination as forces for moral and political liberation
  • Atheism, vegetarianism, free love and opposition to tyranny
  • The Masque of Anarchy is often cited as an early statement of non-violent resistance

Quick-fire facts

  • •Born at Field Place near Horsham, Sussex; known as 'Mad Shelley' at Eton
  • •Expelled from University College, Oxford, in 1811 with Thomas Jefferson Hogg
  • •First married Harriet Westbrook; married Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin in 1816 after Harriet's suicide
  • •Present at the Villa Diodati in 1816 when Mary began Frankenstein
  • •Drowned when his boat sank in a storm in the Gulf of La Spezia on 8 July 1822
  • •Cremated on the beach at Viareggio; Edward Trelawny is said to have snatched his heart from the pyre
  • •His ashes lie in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, near Keats, with the inscription 'Cor Cordium'

Drill it — 9 cards

1 / 9new card

Sources