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Percy Bysshe Shelley dies

Romantic poet, playwright, radical, free thinker and all around rogue Percy Bysshe Shelley drowns off the coast of Livorno, Tuscany on on July 8, 1822.

On July 8, 1822, Romantic poet stamp Percy Bysshe Shelley

 Alas, Royal Mail hasn’t seen fit to publish an exceptional stamp for Shelley. 
Percy Bysshe Shelley “To A Skylark”
Part of the 2020 Romantic Poets series
Issued Royal Mail in 2020
Designers: The Chase

The life and works of Percy Bysshe Shelley exemplify English Romanticism in both its extremes of joyous ecstasy and brooding despair. Romanticism’s major themes—restlessness and brooding, rebellion against authority, interchange with nature, the power of the visionary imagination and of poetry, the pursuit of ideal love, and the untamed spirit ever in search of freedom—all of these Shelley exemplified in the way he lived his life and live on in the substantial body of work that he left the world after his legendary death by drowning at age 29.  
Percy Bysshe Shelley | Poetry Foundation

Greece issued a stamp a year later.

Percy Shelley, Poet Greek stamp

Percy Shelley, Poet
Part of the Philhellenes series
Issued by Greek post office in 2021
Designer: Myrsini Vardopoulou

Ozymandias
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Published January 1818 

 

 

 

United Kingdom Royal Mail This day in stamps