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This collection is now complete: 155 poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley from Thomas Hutchinson’s Oxford edition of his Complete Poetical Works (1914), free to read. It covers his shorter poems and longer works such as Adonais and Epipsychidion; book-length poems such as Queen Mab, the verse dramas and the translations are not included.
Percy Bysshe Shelley was born on 4 August 1792 at Field Place, near Horsham in Sussex, the eldest son of Timothy Shelley, a country squire and later a baronet and Member of Parliament. He was educated at Syon House Academy and at Eton, where his independence earned him the nickname “Mad Shelley,” and went up to University College, Oxford, in 1810. In March 1811 he was expelled, together with his friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg, for refusing to disown the pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism.
That summer Shelley eloped with sixteen-year-old Harriet Westbrook, and the couple moved between Edinburgh, York, Ireland, Wales, and Devon while he wrote political pamphlets and his first long poem, Queen Mab (1813). In 1814 he left Harriet for Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, the daughter of the philosopher William Godwin and the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft. Alastor appeared in 1816, the year Shelley and Mary spent the summer with Lord Byron near Geneva, where Shelley wrote “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” and “Mont Blanc” and Mary began Frankenstein. After Harriet’s suicide late in 1816, Shelley and Mary married, but the courts denied him custody of his two children by his first wife.
In 1818 the Shelleys left England for Italy, where he spent the rest of his life and wrote his greatest work: Julian and Maddalo, the lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound, the tragedy The Cenci, “Ode to the West Wind,” “To a Skylark,” “The Cloud,” and, in response to the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, “The Mask of Anarchy” and “England in 1819.” His sonnet “Ozymandias” had appeared in 1818. At Pisa he wrote Epipsychidion and the essay A Defence of Poetry (1821), and after the death of Keats he composed the elegy Adonais (1821).
On 8 July 1822, a month short of his thirtieth birthday, Shelley drowned when his boat, the Don Juan, went down in a storm in the Gulf of Spezia while sailing home from Livorno with his friend Edward Williams. He left The Triumph of Life unfinished. His body was cremated on the beach at Viareggio, and his ashes were buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, near the grave of Keats. Mary Shelley edited his Posthumous Poems (1824) and the collected Poetical Works (1839), and he is now remembered as one of the major English Romantic poets.
The poem texts on Poetry Catalog follow the public domain Project Gutenberg edition of Thomas Hutchinson’s Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Oxford), so punctuation and wording may differ slightly from other editions. For the linked list of his poems on this site, visit Percy Bysshe Shelley Poems.