English poet · 1792–1822
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley was a Romantic poet and political radical whose lyric and philosophical poems imagine change on personal, natural and historical scales.
Exiled from conventional English society for much of his adult life, Shelley wrote about power, liberty, mind and the nonhuman world while living in Britain and Italy.
How to read Percy Bysshe Shelley
- Large natural forces become figures for thought, revolution and poetic creation.
- Expansive syntax, apostrophe and rapid chains of simile make the speaker seem to pursue ideas in motion.