Percy Bysshe Shelley

Shelley's poetry and prose were radical enough in political and religious content that much went unpublished or expurgated during his lifetime to avoid prosecution. He achieved no fame before his death, but his work found readers in Owenist and Chartist circles from the 1820s onward, eventually drawing admirers from Karl Marx to Gandhi. His life zigzagged through family crises, ill health, and backlash over his atheism and defiance of social convention. In 1818 he left England for good, settling in Italy with his second wife Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein. Over four years he wrote Prometheus Unbound, The Cenci, "Ozymandias," "Ode to the West Wind," Adonais, and other long and short works that would make him essential to Browning, Yeats, Hardy, and Swinburne. He died in a boating accident in 1822. Recognition grew steadily after, and by the 1960s critics had settled the verdict: sweeping imagery, generic mastery, and a sceptical intellect unmatched in English verse.