English poet PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY (1792-1822) was born on August 4.
"Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.“
“Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you
Ye are many — they are few."
Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the 19th century’s most restless literary spirits, a poet who treated language as both a political instrument and a vehicle for private revelation. Born into privilege in 1792, he spent much of his short life resisting it—writing radical tracts, championing free thought, and drifting across Europe in search of communities that matched his ideals. His major works, from Prometheus Unbound to Ode to the West Wind, show a mind convinced that imagination could unsettle power and remake the world. Shelley’s life was famously turbulent—marked by exile, scandal, and a fierce devotion to fellow writers like Lord Byron and Mary Shelley—yet his legacy is unusually steady: a poet who believed, with startling sincerity, that art could spark transformation.
Here’s Bryan Cranston (better known as Walter White from Breaking Bad) reading Shelley’s powerful Ozymandias.