‘For him, the poetic was political’: how Shelley stands tall as a great Romantic poet

Two centuries on from his untimely death, Shelley’s work remains widely read and deeply loved. Reeta Chakrabarti pays tribute to his genius

Percy Bysshe Shelley: poet, atheist, and determined opponent of the over-powerful. What would he have made of the dramatic resignation this week by Boris Johnson after weeks of his authority ebbing away? A flight of fancy of course, but an irresistible one for me, whose working life these last days and weeks has been dominated by the disintegration of Johnson’s credibility. All the while I’ve been preparing – in my downtime – to commemorate 200 years since the death of a titan of English poetry and a political radical.

Like the outgoing prime minister, Shelley went to Eton, but the common ground stops there. He was a rebel at heart, distrustful of authority, and raged at abuses of power by what he saw as the unaccountable and heartless establishment. Perhaps his most famous poem, Ozymandias, mocks the empty legacy of a puffed-up despot. Meanwhile England in 1819, written in the last year of the reign of George III who had for years been mentally incapable, tells of “Rulers who neither see nor feel nor know, But leechlike to their fainting Country cling”.