Shelley, Percy Bysshe

Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822), poet, b. Field Place, Sussex, England.

Percy Bysshe Shelley was the son of a rich landowner who was also a Member of Parliament.

As a schoolboy at Eton College, he had unusual ideas and was nicknamed 'mad Shelley'.

He went on to Oxford University and there wrote a book against religion. Shelley did not believe in God and in this book he said that the world would be a better place if no one did. As a result, he was expelled from Oxford and his father refused to give him any more money.

At nineteen, Shelley married a girl aged sixteen. Later they left each other and she killed herself.

For a time he tried to put into practice his ideas for changing the world. He went up in a balloon and dropped pamphlets called A Declaration of Rights. But in 1818, with his second wife, he went to live in Italy and wrote his ideas in poems like Prometheus Unbound.

'Poetry turns all things to loveliness,' Shelley said, and he wrote some of the loveliest poems ever written. The best-known are Ode to the West Wind, The Cloud and To a Skylark.

John Keats was a friend of his and Shelley wrote a famous poem called Adonais in memory of him when he died very young.

Shelley himself died at the age of thirty. He was sailing in a yacht in the sea near Leghorn when it sank in a sudden storm.

His body was cremated and the ashes are buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome.

Shelley's second wife, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-18 51), wrote a famous book, Frankenstein. It has provided ideas for many modern horror movies.

Shelley's Poetry and Prose (Norton Critical Edition) ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley