Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), one of the great Romantic poets, was born on this day in Sussex, England. The eldest of six children, his father was a conservative member of Parliament.

At 21, Shelley fell in love with 16-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, daughter of two radical thinkers. Together they defied convention, their love awakening a storm of creativity and conviction. In 1818, Mary published Frankenstein, and Percy supported her brilliance even as his own poetry soared.

In Shelley’s circle of kindred spirits was fellow Romantic Lord Byron, whose brilliance and boldness mirrored his own. The two poets bonded over freedom, truth, and the power of the written word. Together with Mary, they spent the haunted summer of 1816 at Villa Diodati near Lake Geneva—a gathering that gave rise to Frankenstein, poetry, and a legacy of literary fire.

A rebel who proudly professed his radical ideas, Shelley was outspoken about his political beliefs. "Poets," he once said, "are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." Shelley was banned and scandalized for his pamphlets, elopements, and activism.

He said, "A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth." Called "mad Shelley" by his classmates at Eton, he was expelled from Oxford University for his pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism. He believed in social action and declared, "A single word even may be a spark of inextinguishable thought."

With poetry that celebrated power, reason, and human love, he spoke out against injustice passionately. In his lyrical Ode to the West Wind (1819), he joined art and philosophy with nature's magical wind.

Hope flowed from his inspired pen. The melodious To a Skylark (1820) praised the free spirit with "profuse strains of unpremeditated art." In Prometheus Unbound, he wrote, "Soul meets soul on lovers’ lips." His beautiful Adonais (1821) was a long elegy for his mentor John Keats.

“The beginning is always today,” Shelley wrote. Like a shooting star, his life burned brightly but briefly. He drowned at age 30 while sailing his schooner on the Italian Riviera.

“The beginning is always today,” Shelley wrote. Like a shooting star, his life burned brightly but briefly. He drowned at age 30 while sailing his schooner on the Italian Riviera. Yet his words, fierce and free, live on, inspiring those who dare to love, dream, and begin.