Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) was an English Romantic poet. Born into the Sussex gentry and expelled from Oxford for a pamphlet on atheism, he eloped twice, the second time with Mary Godwin, and left England for Italy in 1818, where he wrote his greatest work in four years: Prometheus Unbound, The Cenci, Adonais, Epipsychidion and the lyrics "Ozymandias," "Ode to the West Wind" and "To a Skylark." A radical in politics and religion, he was little read in his lifetime; A Defence of Poetry, his chief prose work, appeared only in 1840. He drowned in the Gulf of Spezia a month before his thirtieth birthday.