Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley, (1792-1822). British Romantic poet. Shelley was the son of a wealthy landowner who rejected him after his expulsion from Oxford University (1811) for writing an atheist pamphlet. He secretly married Harriet Westbrook in the same year and the couple embarked on a nomadic existence. He came under the influence of the radical philosopher William Godwin and in 1814 eloped abroad with Godwin’s daughter Mary (1797-1851), later the author of Franken-stein (1818). After Shelley’s first wife drowned herself in the Serpentine in 1816, he married Mary. They settled in Italy, where Shelley wrote most of his famous poems, including Prometheus Unbound (1820), Epipsychidion (1821), and Adonais (1821). In July 1822 he sailed to Leghorn to visit Byron and was drowned on the return journey.
