Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), expelled from Oxford in 1811 for co-authoring the pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism, was an uncompromising idealist who championed vegetarianism, free love, political republicanism, and nonviolent resistance against tyranny. Married to Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (Mary Shelley), the couple went into exile in Italy in 1818.

In Italy, Shelley penned some of the most radiant lyric poems in the English language, including Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark, and the monumental sonnet Ozymandias, mocking the transitory hubris of imperial conquerors. In The Masque of Anarchy (1819), written in fury after the Peterloo Massacre, Shelley formulated the doctrine of nonviolent mass civil disobedience ('Ye are many—they are few!'), which later directly inspired Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. Shelley drowned at age twenty-nine when his boat *Don Juan* sank in a sudden tempest in the Gulf of Spezia.