Wikipedia Tours: Famous Poets (1 of 41)

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Wikipedia Tours: Famous Poets

Welcome to Wikipedia Tours: Famous Poets. Each day we’ll send you a link to a new article about a famous poet on Wikipedia. The introduction to each day’s article is included in the installment so you can choose to read just the introduction or the full article.

Happy reading!

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

Percy Bysshe Shelley (August 4, 1792 – July 8, 1822; pronounced /ˈpɝːsɪ ˈbɪʃ ˈʃɛlɪ/) was one of the major English Romantic poets and is widely considered to be among the finest lyric poets of the English language. He is perhaps most famous for such anthology pieces as Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark, and The Masque of Anarchy. However, his major works were long visionary poems including Alastor, Adonais, The Revolt of Islam, Prometheus Unbound and the unfinished The Triumph of Life.

Shelley's unconventional life and uncompromising idealism, combined with his strong skeptical voice, made him an authoritative and much denigrated figure during his life. He became the idol of the next two or three generations of poets, including the major Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite poets Robert Browning, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, as well as William Butler Yeats and poets in other languages such as Jibanananda Das and Subramanya Bharathy. He was also admired by Karl Marx, Henry Stephens Salt, and Bertrand Russell. Famous for his association with his contemporaries John Keats and Lord Byron, he was also married to novelist Mary Shelley.

Sample poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley:

“Ozymandias”
I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said:—Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,

Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,

The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.

And on the pedestal these words appear:

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains: round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Click here for the full article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Bysshe_Shelley

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