Meet the Author
Percy Bysshe Shelley
English · 1792–1822 · Romantic poet
Portrait: After Amelia Curran, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
An English Romantic poet and radical who was expelled from Oxford and drowned off the Italian coast before he turned 30.
1 StoryBites Edition1 Poem
Why read Percy Bysshe Shelley?
Shelley believed poetry could change the world, and he wrote often against tyranny and blind authority. Ozymandias makes that point in 14 lines: a king’s boastful words survive on a broken statue in an empty desert. Read it for its layered narration, a traveler’s report inside the speaker’s account, and its sharp final irony.
A life in six dates
- 1792Born at Field Place, near Horsham, Sussex
- 1811Expelled from Oxford after co-writing The Necessity of Atheism
- 1816Marries Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, later Mary Shelley
- 1818Publishes Ozymandias in The Examiner and moves to Italy
- 1819Writes The Masque of Anarchy after the Peterloo Massacre
- 1820Publishes Prometheus Unbound
- 1822Drowns when his boat sinks off the Italian coast
Themes across the work
The StoryBites Editions
Context that actually matters
The younger RomanticsShelley, Keats, and Byron were a younger generation of Romantic poets whose work mixed lyric feeling with politics and classical subjects.
Ramesses IIOzymandias is a Greek form of a name of the Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II, and European interest in Egyptian antiquities was high when Shelley wrote.
A sonnet contestShelley and his friend Horace Smith each wrote a sonnet on the same subject, and both appeared in The Examiner in early 1818.