Although he died before the age of 30, many of his poems are considered masterpieces, including "The Cloud," "To a Skylark," and "Prometheus Unbound."
As a student at prep school he was bullied by his classmates for being different: he didn't like sports, and he conducted scientific experiments in his room. They called him "Mad Shelley." He was a published author before he even enrolled in college at Oxford; his first book was a gothic novel called Zastrozzi (1810). As a young man, Shelley was more interested in politics than poetry. He was expelled from college for writing a pamphlet called The Necessity of Atheism (1811).
He married Harriet Westbrook, a girl of sixteen, and together they moved to Dublin, where Shelley wrote more pamphlets and tried to get the Irish to revolt. A year after his first child with his wife Harriet was born, Shelley fell in love with another woman (Mary Shelley who authored "Frankenstein") and ran away with her to France. The Shelleys went to Italy to meet Byron in the summer of 1818. Their two children, Clara and William, died there, but still it was Percy Shelley's most productive period.
He wrote "Adonis," an elegy on the death of John Keats; "Prometheus Unbound," a lyrical drama; and The Cenci, a tragedy. Shelley died on a sailboat that sank in a storm off the Italian coast. His body washed up on the shore at Viareggio; in his pocket was a copy of a book of poems by Keats. He said, "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world."
~Writer's Almanac
"Ozymandias" (1818) was a poem by Percy Shelley about an ancient king who in his pride of power had a monument built in his likeness. On its pedestal he had stonecutters inscribe: "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
The poem begins innocently enough and builds to its mordantly ironic conclusion" "Nothing beside remains. Round the decay/ of what colossal wreck, boundless and bare/ The lone and level sands stretch far away".
Ozymandias is a symbol of what the preacher in Ecclesiastes said: "Vanity, vanity, all is vanity".
"If Winter comes, can spring be far behind?"
The final line of "Ode to the West Wind" by Percy Shelley. In this poem, Shelley prays to the powerful west wind, which can drive all before it---leaves, seeds, clouds, waves:
