Percy Bysshe Shelley was an English Romantic poet, born in 1792 in Sussex. He was the eldest son of a wealthy landowner who held the hereditary title of baronet. Shelley attended Eton College from 1804 to 1810 and later enrolled at University College, Oxford. In 1811, he was expelled along with his close friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg after they refused to deny or apologize for publishing the pamphlet *The Necessity of Atheism*.
That same year, Shelley married Harriet Westbrook, with whom he had a daughter and a son. In 1813 he completed his first major poem, *Queen Mab*, in which he expressed many of the radical ideas that would define his thought, including atheism, political reform, equality, and universal brotherhood. Fearing legal repercussions, publishers refused to print the work, so Shelley privately produced a limited number of copies and distributed them among friends and acquaintances.
In 1814, Shelley fell in love with Mary Godwin, the seventeen-year-old daughter of the philosopher William Godwin, who had been one of his intellectual mentors. Shelley and Mary eloped to France and Switzerland. Although he wrote to Harriet proposing that she join them in a companionate relationship, she refused. In December 1816, following the breakdown of their marriage, Harriet tragically took her own life by drowning in London's Serpentine Lake in Hyde Park.
Shortly afterward, Percy and Mary married. Their family life was marked by repeated tragedy: several of their children died in infancy, and only their youngest son, Percy Florence Shelley, survived to adulthood. During the famous summer of 1816, Shelley and Mary stayed near Lake Geneva with Lord Byron and Mary's stepsister Claire Clairmont, who later gave birth to Byron's daughter.
Shelley continued to write poetry and gradually gained recognition within literary circles. In 1818, the Shelleys settled in Italy, where they became part of the so-called Pisa Circle, a group of distinguished English, Irish, and Greek writers, artists, and intellectuals. There Shelley became acquainted with Alexandros Mavrokordatos and, inspired by the Greek War of Independence, wrote the lyrical drama *Hellas*, a passionate tribute to the Greek struggle for freedom.
On 8 July 1822, while sailing in the Gulf of La Spezia, Shelley's boat was caught in a storm and sank. He drowned at the age of twenty-nine. Though his life was brief, his visionary poetry secured him a lasting place among the greatest figures of English literature and one of the leading poets of the Romantic movement.
