Percy Bysshe Shelley

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Percy Bysshe Shelley was born August 4, 1792, in Sussex, England. He drowned in a storm while traveling from Livorno to Lerici in his schooner on July 8, 1822. Shelley was one of the six great English poets of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries later dubbed the High Romantics (the others being Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron and Keats.) Although he possessed a love for humanity in general, he was demonstrated to be very bad towards humans in particular, bullying several people and callously treating several women.

Shelley was anti-religious and an atheist his whole life[1] and promoted a poetic program similar to Blake's, in which the individual imagination is the sole authority on matters of truth. His play in verse Prometheus Unbound explores his interest in a renewed imaginative and creative life in the story of Prometheus. In critic Harold Bloom's reading, the play's characters Prometheus, Asia, Jupiter and Demogorgon bear resemblances to the psychic constructs of other writers including Blake, Yeats and Freud.[2]

Other major poems written by Shelley include "Ozymandias", Alastor, "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty", "Mont Blanc", "Ode to the West Wind", "The Witch of Atlas", Epipsychidion, "Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats", and "The Triumph of Life".

Shelley's "Essay on Christianity" attempts to read Jesus as an ethic philosopher whose great teachings have been corrupted by the institutional religion called Christianity.


  1. Shelley, The Necessity of Atheism
  2. Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry, New York: Cornell UP, 1971, pp. 90-91.