Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley was expelled from Oxford for a pamphlet on atheism, eloped twice, was denied custody of his children, and left England in 1818 for Italy, where he wrote nearly all the poetry that matters and drowned sailing in the Gulf of Spezia at twenty-nine. Adonais mourns Keats; The Cenci is the one Romantic tragedy still staged; A Defence of Poetry ends with poets as the unacknowledged legislators of the world. Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein on their travels, edited him after his death. The Victorians made him an angel; he was a radical.