Knowra Percy Bysshe Shelley Percy Bysshe Shelley Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) was an English Romantic poet whose works include “Ozymandias,” Prometheus Unbound, and “Ode to the West Wind.” His poetry joined radical political and religious ideas to lyric intensity and imaginative myth.
English Romanticism : A late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British literary movement emphasizing imagination, emotion, nature, and individual freedom. Shelley’s poetry is a defining, politically radical strand of this movement.
Ozymandias : A sonnet by Shelley depicting the ruined statue of a ruler whose boast of power has outlasted his empire. Its compressed scene turns political arrogance and the decay of power into a memorable lyric.
Mary Shelley : An English novelist and writer best known for Frankenstein and the wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Their partnership shaped their writing lives, and she preserved and edited his work after his death.
The Necessity of Atheism : A pamphlet published in 1811 by Percy Bysshe Shelley and Thomas Jefferson Hogg questioning whether God’s existence could be demonstrated. Its publication at Oxford precipitated Shelley’s expulsion and made his religious dissent public.
Percy Shelley’s funeral pyre : The cremation of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s body on a beach near Viareggio after his death in 1822. The event, attended by Byron and Leigh Hunt, became an enduring image of his afterlife.
Lyrical poetry : Poetry that presents a speaker’s thoughts or feelings in a concentrated, musical form. Many of Shelley’s best-known works use lyric speakers and intricate sound patterns.
Ode to the West Wind : A 1819 lyric poem in which Shelley addresses the west wind as a force of destruction and renewal. Its linked sections make natural change a figure for poetic and political transformation.
Lord Byron : An English Romantic poet whose works include Don Juan and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Shelley’s friendship with Byron in Italy linked two major poets with sharply different styles.
Peterloo Massacre : The 1819 killing and injury of demonstrators by cavalry at a reform meeting in Manchester. The massacre prompted Shelley to write The Masque of Anarchy and other protest poetry.
Shelley Memorial at University College Oxford : A marble memorial to Percy Bysshe Shelley installed at University College, Oxford, in 1893. The memorial marks the university’s later commemoration of a student it had expelled.
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