He died today in 1822
"Henry David Thoreau's civil disobedience and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi's passive resistance were influenced and inspired by Shelley's nonviolence in protest and political action.[19] It is known that Gandhi would often quote Shelley's Masque of Anarchy.[20], which has been called "perhaps the first modern statement of the principle of nonviolent resistance."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Bysshe_Shelley

Amplify’d from www.npg.org.uk

Sitter associated with 8 portraits The poet and novelist Shelley was sent down from Oxford in 1811 for professing his atheism. Believing in individual liberty and the perfection of humanity, he was an uncompromising idealist throughout his short life. Queen Mab (1813), promoting radical social change, was Shelley's first major poem. Later forced to flee his creditors, he and his wife Mary Shelley escaped to Italy in 1818. It was there that he produced some of his best work, including Ode to the West Wind (1819) and Adonais, a pastoral elegy inspired by Keats's death in 1821. Returning from visiting Byron and Leigh Hunt in Pisa, he was drowned in a storm at sea. Read more at www.npg.org.uk