“Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry (1821)

About Percy Bysshe Shelley

1792 – 1822

English Romantic poet, author of 'Ozymandias' and 'Adonais', an elegy for John Keats.

“Winter is come and gone, but grief returns with the revolving year.”

“Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.”

“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

“Any one thing in the creation is sufficient to demonstrate a Providence to an humble and grateful mind.”

“If music be the food of love, play on.”

“Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue.”

“If eyes were made for seeing, then beauty is its own excuse for being.”

“The chief forms of beauty are order and symmetry and definiteness.”

“Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.”