About this person
Percy Bysshe Shelley was an English Romantic poet, playwright and essayist. He had a limited readership during his lifetime but was later recognised as one of the most important poets in the English language and influenced both literature and political thought.
He was born into a wealthy family in Sussex and studied at the University of Oxford, from which he was expelled after publishing The Necessity of Atheism. His personal life and radical views caused controversy. In 1816, he married the writer Mary Shelley.
His best-known works include Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark, Adonaïs and the drama Prometheus Unbound. He died at the age of twenty-nine when his boat sank in the Ligurian Sea.
Shelley advocated vegetarianism on the grounds of health, animal suffering, land use and social inequality. His writings later influenced the British vegetarian movement and George Bernard Shaw.