Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley (August 4, 1792 – July 8, 1822) was one of the major English Romantic poets and is esteemed by some scholars the finest lyric poet in the English language. He is perhaps most widely famous for such anthology pieces as Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark, and The Masque of Anarchy; but his major works were long visionary poems such as Adonais and Prometheus Unbound. Shelley's unconventional life and uncompromising idealism made him a notorious and much denigrated figure in his own life, but he became the idol of the following two or three generations of poets (including the major Victorian poets Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne, as well as William Butler Yeats.) He was also famous for his association with contemporaries John Keats and Lord Byron, and, like them, for his untimely death at a young age. He was married to the equally famous novelist Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein. He was interested in the concept of free love and often went to great and sometimes dubious lengths to promote the idea (once, for instance, sleeping with his wife's step-sister after his wife had miscarried).

External links

• Trelawny Recovers Shelley's Body. Trelawny's account of searching for Shelley and his companions after the storm in which they perished.
• Trelawny Burns Shelley's Body. Trelawny's account of overseeing the exhumation and burning of Shelley's body.
• Project Gutenberg e-texts of some of Percy Bysshe Shelley's works
• Selected Poems of Shelley
• A talk on Shelley's politics (MP3) by Paul Foot of the British Socialist Workers Party: part 1, part 2
• A pedigree of the Shelley family