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.

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.