He comes to most of us in neatly packaged school anthologies which safely repeat the classics (Ozymandias, To a Skylark, and Ode to the West Wind), but Shelley's verse like The Masque of [[Anarchy]] shaped the world. Shelley and his two companions drowned off the coast of Italy after their boat ran into difficulties and sank. He was only 29 but he left a body of work which endures. With the bicentenary of his premature death in July 2022, there has never been a better time to re-examine Shelley's enduring legacy. Benjamin Zephaniah is a huge admirer of Shelley. After a terrible start with the poet at school when the teacher told him he was stupid for not fully understanding what he was reading, Benjamin was turned on to Shelley in his early 20s when he stumbled on a copy of Paul Foot's 'Red Shelley'. Paul Foot put Shelley's works into the historical context in which they were written, in the early 19th century, at a time of profound social and political instability.