Shelley, Percy Bysshe

(4 August 1792 – 8 July 1822)  Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the major English Romantic poets .  Although Shelley did not receive fame during his lifetime, his works have inspired several generations of poets, including Robert Browning and Dante Gabriel Rosetti .  Shelley's unconventional lifestyle and lterary works were considerd radical for his day.  His social and political views, particularly those on nonviolent civil disobedience, inspired Henry David Thoreau who in turn inspired Mahtma Ghandi's stance on nonviolent protest in his quest for independence from British rule in India.
Shelley is perhaps best known for works such as Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind,  Queen Mab, The Revolt of Islam, Adonaïs, and Prometheus Unbound (1820).
==Stevens and Shelley==
Shelley's A Defense of Poetry and Stevens’ “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction” are strikingly similar.  Paul G. Italia writes in his essay "Of Minstels Lacking Minstrelsy": Shelley and Wallace Stevens' 'Notes toward a Supreme Fiction,'" "Each argues for imagination as the faculty responsible for all forms of order in human existence, and, to this end, each work indicates that poetry, human love, and musical harmony are parallel articulations of the desire for beauty and relation. But while Stevens accepts Shelley as critic, he depreciates Shelley as poet, and all echoes of Shelley’s verse register discordantly."
==References==
Italia, Paul G. "'Of Minstrels Lacking Minstrelsy': Shelley and Wallace Stevens' 'Notes toward a Supreme Fiction.'" Wallace Stevens Journal 17.2 (1993): 168-179. Print.
Percy Bysshe Shelley