1792-1822 · English Romantic poet, author of Ozymandias and Prometheus Unbound
About Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was an English Romantic poet, expelled from Oxford in 1811 for a pamphlet on atheism, and a radical in politics. Married to Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, he moved to Italy in 1818, where he wrote Prometheus Unbound, Adonais, and many of his best lyrics before drowning off the Tuscan coast at twenty-nine.
Ozymandias is a fourteen-line sonnet about a ruined statue of an Egyptian king in the desert, and it has become the best-known English poem on the vanity of earthly power. Shelley wrote it in late 1817, in a friendly sonnet-writing contest with his friend Horace Smith on the same subject, and Leigh Hunt printed it in The Examiner on 11 January 1818.