For a long time Shelley and Byron, and to a lesser extent Keats, more or less defined what it meant to be a (male) “Romantic Poet”: radical, impulsive, bohemian, idealistic, world-weary, and young. Though less well-known than his friend Byron, his atheist views (which led to his expulsion from Oxford University), his wife’s death by suicide, his elopement with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, and his drowning in the Gulf of La Spezia in a boat called Don Juan, were all notorious. Even those who disapproved of his opinions and way of life, such as Wordsworth, acknowledged his mastery of every kind of poetry.