Percy Bysshe Shelley

Born on August 4, 1792, at Field Place, a country estate near Horsham in Sussex, Shelley was the eldest son of a prosperous Whig baronet. He was educated at Eton, where he was bullied and earned the nickname "Mad Shelley," and entered University College, Oxford, in 1810, only to be expelled the following year for co-authoring a pamphlet titled The Necessity of Atheism. At nineteen he eloped with Harriet Westbrook, a schoolgirl of sixteen; the marriage ended in disaster when Shelley abandoned her for Mary Godwin, the daughter of the radical philosopher William Godwin and the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. Harriet drowned herself in the Serpentine in 1816. Shelley married Mary shortly after and in 1818 left England permanently for Italy, where he produced almost all of the work for which he is remembered: the lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound (1820), the elegy Adonais (1821) for his friend John Keats, and poems of astonishing incandescent force, "Ozymandias" (1818), "Ode to the West Wind" (1819), "To a Skylark" (1820). His political verse, including The Mask of Anarchy (1819), written after the Peterloo Massacre, later inspired figures as diverse as Karl Marx and Mahatma Gandhi. On July 8, 1822, Shelley drowned when his sailing boat, the Don Juan, sank in a sudden storm in the Gulf of Spezia. He was twenty-nine. His body, washed ashore days later, was cremated on the beach; his friend Edward Trelawny claimed to have snatched his heart from the flames.