Persey Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was one of the most influential English Romantic poets, still known for his classic poems such as “Ode to the West Wind”, “Adonais,” “Mont Blanc,” and “To a Skylark.” His non-violent political and economic thought is said to have influenced the likes of Karl Marx, Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In addition to writing about non-violence, Shelley wrote on the subject of vegetarianism, having turned vegetarian himself at the age of 20. In his essays, “A Vindication of Natural Diet” and “On the Vegetable System of Diet,” he explained how a meatless diet was an ideal mode of consumption for living a healthy, disease-free life.
“There is no disease, bodily, or mental, which adoption of a vegetable diet and pure water has not infallibly mitigated, wherever the experiment has been fairly tried.”