English · 1792–1822
Percy Bysshe Shelley was the most politically radical and philosophically ambitious of the English Romantic poets. Prometheus Unbound reimagines human liberation; the odes to the West Wind and the Skylark are among the most famous lyrics in English; and A Defence of Poetry is the most passionate argument for literature's moral importance in the language. He drowned at twenty-nine in a sailing accident off the Italian coast.