Percy Bysshe Shelley, portrait by Alfred Clint (after Amelia Curran), 1819. Wikimedia Commons · public domain.
Poet · Pairing VIII
Percy Bysshe Shelley
1792–1822 · Major poet of the second generation of English Romantics
“Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the boldest voices of English Romanticism — a lyric poet of dazzling music and a fierce political radical who championed liberty, reform, and the imagination against tyranny. Expelled from Oxford for a pamphlet on atheism, he spent much of his life abroad, moving in a brilliant circle that included Lord Byron and his wife, Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein.
He wrote “Ozymandias” in 1817 as part of a friendly sonnet-writing contest, prompted by news of a colossal Egyptian statue bound for the British Museum. In fourteen lines the poem turns a shattered monument into a timeless warning about the arrogance of power — and it has become one of the most famous sonnets in English.
Shelley’s other major works include “Ode to the West Wind,” “To a Skylark,” the verse drama Prometheus Unbound, and the essay “A Defence of Poetry,” with its famous claim that poets are “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” He drowned in a boating accident off the Italian coast in 1822, not yet thirty.
In this curriculum
Read him in Pairing VIII — Ruins, Time & Legacy →