27 Mar Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was one of the greatest of the Romantic poets. Like his friends Byron and Keats, he produced a remarkable body of work in a very short life. He is remembered for classic poems such as Ozymandias (1818), Ode to the West Wind (1819), To a Skylark (1820) and The Cloud (1820). Among his long philosophical poems, Queen Mab (1813) and Prometheus Unbound (1820) are the best known. His second wife was Mary Godwin, also a writer, who’s most famous for the Gothic novel Frankenstein (1818) which she wrote under the name Mary Shelley.

Shelley drowned in a storm at the age of 29 while sailing in the Gulf of La Spezia, Italy. His body was washed ashore and cremated on a nearby beach. The ashes were interred in Rome’s Protestant Cemetery, also the burial site of Keats (who had died the year before). Despite being expelled from University College, Oxford in 1811 for writing about atheism, he is celebrated there by the elaborate Shelley Memorial. In London, Shelley is commemorated by a memorial tablet in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, alongside memorials to Keats and Byron.