Percy Bysshe Shelley

The only mature portrait of the poet to be surely authenticated was painted by Amelia Curran, daughter of the Irish statesman John Philpott Curran, in 1819 when the Shelleys were living in Rome where she was in residence as a student still learning her basic craft. Although thus the product of an inexperienced portraitist and never thought very true by Shelley's intimate friends, the romantic cast of the painting has had a marked impact on the popular conception of Shelley as an otherworldly aesthete. It was first reproduced as an engraving in Finden's Landscape & Portrait Illustrations to the Life and Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 (London: John Murray, 1832), which is the version included here. The original is in the National Portrait Gallery, London.

• Full Biography
• Works:
  • Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude
  • The Cenci
  • "The Cloud"
  • "Dark Spirit of the Desart Rude"
  • "Declaration of Rights"
  • A Defense of Poetry (extract)
  • "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty"
  • "Julian and Maddalo: A Conversation"
  • "Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills"
  • "The Mask of Anarchy"
  • "Mont Blanc"
  • "Mutability"
  • "The Necessity of Atheism"
  • "Ode to the West Wind"
  • Peter Bell the Third
  • Prometheus Unbound
  • Queen Mab: A Philosophical Poem
  • Review of Frankenstein
  • The Revolt of Islam
  • "Rosalind and Helen: A Modern Eclogue"
  • "To Wordsworth"
  • "The Witch of Atlas"
• Illustrations:
  • Portrait, age 10 or 12
  • Amelia Curran portrait
  • Oxford, c. 1802
  • Protestant Cemetery, Rome
  • Monument