1792–1822Romanticism18th century
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley was an English writer who is considered one of the major English Romantic poets. A radical in his poetry as well as in his political and social views, Shelley did not achieve fame during his lifetime, but recognition of his achievements in poetry grew steadily following his death, and he became an important influence on subsequent generations of poets, including Robert Browning, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Thomas Hardy, and W. B. Yeats. American literary critic Harold Bloom describes him as "a superb craftsman, a lyric poet without rival, and surely one of the most advanced sceptical intellects ever to write a poem."
Did you know?
Shelley was expelled from Oxford University after just one year for co-writing a pamphlet titled 'The Necessity of Atheism'.
He drowned at 29 in a sailing accident off the Italian coast. According to accounts, his heart refused to burn during cremation and was kept by his wife, Mary Shelley.
His second wife was Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein — they eloped when she was sixteen years old.
'Ozymandias', one of his most famous sonnets, was written as part of a friendly competition with his friend, the poet Horace Smith, who wrote a sonnet on the same theme the same week.
Poems
150 poems- 'Mighty Eagle'7 lines
- A Bridal Song18 lines
- A Fragment: To Music5 lines
- A Hate-Song4 lines
- A New National Anthem42 lines
- A Summer Evening Churchyard31 lines
- A Tale of Society As It Is: From Facts, 181180 lines
- Adonais499 lines
- Alastor: Or, the Spirit of Solitude730 lines
- An Exhortation27 lines
- An Ode, Written October, 1819, Before the Spaniards Had Recovered Their Liberty35 lines
- Another Fragment: To Music3 lines
- Bigotry's Victim36 lines
- Cancelled Passage of Mont Blanc5 lines
- Cancelled Stanza7 lines
- Charles the First1007 lines
- Circumstance9 lines
- Death16 lines
- Epipsychidion624 lines
- Farewell to North Devon6 lines
- Feelings of a Republican on the Fall of Bonaparte14 lines
- Fragment31 lines
- Fragment From the Wandering Jew10 lines
- Fragment of a Ghost Story8 lines
- Fragment of the Elegy on the Death of Bion14 lines
- Fragment: 'A Gentle Story of Two Lovers Young'10 lines
- Fragment: 'Follow to the Deep Wood's Weeds'7 lines
- Fragment: 'Is It That in Some Brighter Sphere'8 lines
- Fragment: 'Methought I Was a Billow in the Crowd'8 lines
- Fragment: 'My Head Is Wild With Weeping'6 lines
- Fragment: 'What Men Gain Fairly'9 lines
- Fragment: 'When Soft Winds and Sunny Skies'7 lines
- Fragment: 'Ye Gentle Visitations of Calm Thought'6 lines
- Fragment: "Amor Aeternus"6 lines
- Fragment: "Igniculus Desiderii"8 lines
- Fragment: A Serpent-Face2 lines
- Fragment: Apostrophe to Silence9 lines
- Fragment: Home3 lines
- Fragment: Love the Universe to-Day4 lines
- Fragment: Love's Tender Atmosphere5 lines
- Fragment: Omens4 lines
- Fragment: Satan Broken Loose15 lines
- Fragment: Sufficient Unto the Day8 lines
- Fragment: Supposed to Be an Epithalamium of Francis Ravaillac and Charlotte Corday157 lines
- Fragment: The False Laurel and the True13 lines
- Fragment: The Lake's Margin4 lines
- Fragment: The Sepulchre of Memory4 lines
- Fragment: The Vine-Shroud4 lines
- Fragment: Thoughts Come and Go in Solitude5 lines
- Fragment: To a Friend Released From Prison10 lines
- Fragment: To Byron3 lines
- Fragment: To One Singing6 lines
- Fragment: To the Moon6 lines
- Fragment: To the People of England8 lines
- Fragment: Wedded Souls12 lines
- Fragments of an Unfinished Drama286 lines
- Fragments Supposed to Be Parts of Otho27 lines
- From the Arabic: An Imitation16 lines
- From the Greek of Moschus15 lines
- From the Original Draft of the Poem to William Shelley15 lines
- Hellas: A Lyrical Drama1506 lines
- Hymn to Intellectual Beauty84 lines
- Hymn to Mercury777 lines
- In Horologium4 lines
- Invocation to Misery65 lines
- Julian and Maddalo. a Conversation635 lines
- Kissing Helena7 lines
- Letter to Maria Gisborne325 lines
- Lines24 lines
- Lines to a Critic16 lines
- Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills374 lines
- Lines Written During the Castlereagh Administration25 lines
- Love24 lines
- Love's Philosophy16 lines
- Marianne's Dream147 lines
- Matilda Gathering Flowers52 lines
- Mont Blanc146 lines
- Mutability21 lines
- Ode to Heaven58 lines
- Ode to the West Wind70 lines
- Oedipus Tyrannus or Swellfoot the Tyrant. a Tragedy in Two Acts1018 lines
- On a Faded Violet12 lines
- On a Fete at Carlton House: Fragment4 lines
- On an Icicle That Clung to the Grass of a Grave35 lines
- On Death32 lines
- On Fanny Godwin6 lines
- On Leaving London for Wales37 lines
- On Robert Emmet's Grave9 lines
- On the Medusa of Leonardo Da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery40 lines
- Otho16 lines
- Ozymandias14 lines
- Pan, Echo, and the Satyr13 lines
- Passage of the Apennines13 lines
- Peter Bell the Third. by Miching Mallecho, Esq837 lines
- Prince Athanase. a Fragment327 lines
- Prometheus Unbound. a Lyrical Drama in Four Acts3090 lines
- Rosalind and Helen. a Modern Eclogue1341 lines
- Scene From 'tasso'62 lines
- Scenes From the Faust of Goethe689 lines
- Scenes From the Magico Prodigioso912 lines
- Similes for Two Political Characters of 181921 lines
- Sister Rosa: A Ballad100 lines
- Song39 lines
- Song From the Wandering Jew8 lines
- Song to the Men of England32 lines
- Sonnet16 lines
- Sonnet to Byron14 lines
- Sonnet: England in 181914 lines
- Sonnet: Political Greatness14 lines
- Sonnet. on Launching Some Bottles Filled With Knowledge into the Bristol Channel14 lines
- Sonnet. to a Balloon Laden With Knowledge14 lines
- Spirit of Plato7 lines
- Stanza From a Translation of the Marseillaise Hymn9 lines
- Stanzas Written in Dejection, Near Naples45 lines
- The Birth of Pleasure14 lines
- The Cenci. a Tragedy in Five Acts3190 lines
- The Daemon of the World632 lines
- The Devil's Walk. a Ballad142 lines
- The Drowned Lover24 lines
- The First Canzone of the Convito61 lines
- The Indian Serenade24 lines
- The Mask of Anarchy. Written on the Occasion of the Massacre at Manchester372 lines
- The Past12 lines
- The Revolt of Islam. a Poem in Twelve Cantos4848 lines
- The Sensitive Plant320 lines
- The Spectral Horseman62 lines
- The Sunset51 lines
- The Triumph of Life579 lines
- The Wandering Jew's Soliloquy29 lines
- The Witch of Atlas676 lines
- The Woodman and the Nightingale239 lines
- To --15 lines
- To a Star15 lines
- To Constantia12 lines
- To Constantia, Singing42 lines
- To Constantia: Stanzas 1 and 216 lines
- To Harriet4 lines
- To Ianthe14 lines
- To Ireland28 lines
- To Mary --16 lines
- To Mary Shelley8 lines
- To Mary Who Died in This Opinion24 lines
- To Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin36 lines
- To Sophia [Miss Stacey]24 lines
- To the Lord Chancellor64 lines
- To the Nile14 lines
- To the Queen of My Heart36 lines
- To William Shelley52 lines
- To Wordsworth14 lines
- With a Guitar, to Jane90 lines