Percy Bysshe Shelley

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 six great early nineteenth century British poets later dubbed the High Romantics (the others being Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron and Keats.) Shelley was an atheist his whole life and promoted a religion of the imagination. His epic poem Prometheus Unbound explores his interest in a renewed imagination/ creative life in the story of Prometheus. Shelley's principle characters Prometheus, Asia, Jupiter and Demogorgon interestingly bear resemblance to the psychic constructs of other writers including Blake, Yeats and Freud. (Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry, Cornell University, New York 1971, p. 90-91).

His major poems include: Alastor, Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, Mont Blanc, Ode to the West Wind, Prometheus Unbound, The Witch of Atlas, Epipsychidion, Adonis, and the Triumph of Life.