Percy Bysshe Shelley - A Brief Life                                                                

English Romantic poet whose passionate quest for human love and social reform was expressed in poetry that ranks with the greatest with its mastery of the English language.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, the son of Sir Timothy Shelley, Member of Parliament for New Shoreham was heir to the wealthy estates acquired by his grandfather Bysshe Shelley.

Educated at Syon House Academy(1802-04), Eton(1804-10) where he was nicknamed "Mad Shelley" and University College, Oxford(1810-11), Shelley developed a strong hatred of bullying and tyranny.

In the spring of 1816 Shelley and Mary with Claire Clairmont, her stepsister, journeyed to Geneva to rendezvous with Lord Byron, with whom Claire had begun an affair. Mary commenced work on her gothic novel Frankenstein, while Shelley composed the poems Mont Blanc and Hymn to Intellectual Beauty.

Back in England Mary had a son, William, by Shelley and with his wife Harriet committing suicide this allowed them to marry in December of that year, however the courts declared him unfit to raise his children, Ianthe and Charles, who were placed in foster care.

They departed for Naples for the winter settling in Rome in the spring of 1819 where Shelley wrote Prometheus Unbound and The Cenci. With the death of their son William from malaria they fled north to Livorno, then to Florence where their only surviving child Percy Florence Shelley was born.

Outraged at the Peterloo Massacre Shelley wrote The Mask of Anarchy in protest and later Peter Bell the Third, an attack on corrupt British society.

Moving to Pisa in 1820 he wrote Oedipus Tyrannus about adultery and Epipsychidion that mythologizes an infatuation with a young admirer. He wrote Adonais on the death of Keats and Hellas celebrating the Greek revolution for human liberty, and in 1821 Byron arrived to renew their friendship.

1822 saw Shelley settle near Lerici where he lived until he sailed across the Bay of Spezia with Edward Williams to welcome his old friend Leigh Hunt. Shelley and Williams drowned on 8th July 1822 when their boat sank at sea in a storm.

Shelley's body was washed ashore several days later, it was cremated on the Shore of Via Reggio and both Byron and Leigh Hunt were in attendance. His heart, which refused to burn, was given to his wife Mary. 

Shelley's ashes were stored for several months in the British Consul's wine cellar in Rome before eventually being buried in the Protestant Cemetery there. When Mary Shelley died in 1851 her husband's heart was found amongst her belongings, it was apparently wrapped in one of the sheets of  Adonais - Shelley's famous elegy to Keats. His heart now lies in St Peter's Churchyard, Bournemouth, England, near to the former Shelley family country home at Boscombe Manor. Mary Shelley's body is buried there as well and the remains of Mary's parents, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, were brought over from Old St. Pancras Churchyard, London and rest in the same grave. There is a monument to Percy Bysshe Shelley in nearby Christchurch Priory.