Percy Bysshe Shelley: “A Defence of Poetry”

Abstract

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792--1822) was the son of a member of Parliament and heir to a baronetcy. He attended Eton and then Oxford, from which he was expelled for publishing a pamphlet called The Necessity of Atheism. He began to publish his poetry in 1813, but it was only after he had left his first wife in favor of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin---whom he later married---that his major poetical works appeared. In 1819, the Shelleys went to Italy, where he died in 1822 in a boating accident.