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The Major Works
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was a Romantic poet of radical imaginings, living in an age of change. His tempestuous life and friendship with Byron, and his tragically early death, at times threatened to overwhelm his legacy as a poet, but today his standing as one of the foremost English authors is assured. This freshly edited collection - the fullest one-volume selection in English - includes all but one of the longer poems, from Queen Mab onwards, in their entirety. Only Laon and Cythna is excerpted, in a generous selection. As well as works such as Prometheus Unbound, The Mask of Anarchy, and Adonais, the volume includes a wide range of Shelley's shorter poems and much of his major prose, including A Defence of Poetry and almost all of A Philosophical View of Reform. Shelley emerges from these pages as a passionate and eloquent opponent of tyranny and a champion of human possibility.
880 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1822
About the author
Percy Bysshe Shelley
1,726 books1,438 followersWorks of Percy Bysshe Shelley, British romantic poet, include "To a Skylark" in 1820;
Prometheus Unbound
, the lyric drama; and "Adonais," an elegy of 1821 to John Keats.
The Cenci , work of art or literature of Percy Bysshe Shelley of 1819, depicts Beatrice Cenci, Italian noblewoman.
People widely consider Percy Bysshe Shelley among the finest majors of the English language. He is perhaps most famous for such anthology pieces as Ozymandias , Ode to the West Wind , and The Masque of Anarchy . His major long visionary Alastor , The Revolt of Islam , and the unfinished The Triumph of Life .
Unconventional life and uncompromising idealism of Percy Bysshe Shelley combined with his strong skeptical voice to make an authoritative and much denigrated figure during his life. He became the idol of the next two or three generations, the major Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, as well as William Butler Yeats and in other languages, such as Jibanananda Das and Subramanya Bharathy . Karl Marx, Henry Stephens Salt, and [authorm:Bertrand Russell] also admired him. Famous for his association with his contemporaries Lord Byron, he also married Mary Shelley, novelist.
The Cenci , work of art or literature of Percy Bysshe Shelley of 1819, depicts Beatrice Cenci, Italian noblewoman.
People widely consider Percy Bysshe Shelley among the finest majors of the English language. He is perhaps most famous for such anthology pieces as Ozymandias , Ode to the West Wind , and The Masque of Anarchy . His major long visionary Alastor , The Revolt of Islam , and the unfinished The Triumph of Life .
Unconventional life and uncompromising idealism of Percy Bysshe Shelley combined with his strong skeptical voice to make an authoritative and much denigrated figure during his life. He became the idol of the next two or three generations, the major Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, as well as William Butler Yeats and in other languages, such as Jibanananda Das and Subramanya Bharathy . Karl Marx, Henry Stephens Salt, and [authorm:Bertrand Russell] also admired him. Famous for his association with his contemporaries Lord Byron, he also married Mary Shelley, novelist.
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April 1, 2013
The Writings of Percy Shelley
22 April 2013
Okay, this is more a collection of his works compiled by somebody else, and many of these works did not actually see the light of day until long after Shelley died, however this particular book does give you a very broad scope of the poems, and a couple of prose essays, of Percy Shelley. Mind you, I began reading this book while I was in London because I felt that being in that marvellous city I should immerse myself in the literature that was produced there. So, wondering into Hyde Park and sitting down beside the Round Pound with a cup of tea on what was an incredibly cold morning, I opened this book and began to read his poetry. However, as it turns out, most of his work was not written in England but rather when he was in Italy (still, there is something to be said about sitting by the round pond, with a cup of tea, on a cold morning, reading Percey Shelley).
Percy Shelley had the misfortune of dying quite young. He was 29 when he died, apparently in a boating accident in the Adriatic sea, and much of his work was written in the final stages of his life, between 1818 and 1821. However, considering the length and breadth of some of his writings, it is amazing what he actually produced in such a short space of time. Now, Shelley was not a poor man, rather he was a member of the upper class who could get away with whiling his time away in Italian villas writing poetry. In those days if you wanted to be a successful writer you needed two things, an education, and free time. These days education (at least here in Australia) is much more accessible than it was in Shelley's time, and even then, you do not need to be a member of the wealthy class to succeed as an author (my friend Peter managed to do it).
Now, many people consider Shelley to be a romantic poet, and in a sense while that may be true, and while I have only read a smattering of Coleridge and Wordsworth, I must say that his poetry seems to be a lot more down to Earth than what we get from the other romantics. If Gustav Flaubert is anything to go by romantics tend to live with their heads in the clouds letting emotion pretty much rule the day, and rejecting reason and science. Shelley is somewhat different in that he is much more of a political critic, and much of his poetry demonstrates this. In fact, if he is not attacking the current government of the day, he is attacking the church, which, in a way, was very much one and the same.
For instance, he writes a poem about how during that battle of Austerlitz the Austrian and Prussian generals sat away from the battlefield in their tents directing the battle, while Napoleon was in there with his men fighting alongside them. In a way it is clear that Shelley had a great admiration for Napoleon because what Napoleon demonstrated was that he was willing to get his hands dirty, to stand with his men, and to be counted as one of them. Remember even when Napoleon was defeated and exiled to Elba, he managed to escape and return to France, and when he did this he was welcomed with open arms and once again made emperor. Even today the French still hold Napoleon on high regard.
However it is interesting that despite all of the mourning that Shelley pours out onto the page regarding the failure of the French Revolution, and the restoration of the French Monarchy in 1815, he unlikely ever actually could remember the revolution. The revolution began in 1789, though the root causes go back much further, and ended with the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 at Waterloo. Shelley died in 1822, which means that he would have been born in 1793, which means that he would have been 7 years old when Napoleon was proclaimed emperor and during his teenage years all he would have known were the Napoleonic Wars. He would not have remembered (let alone been born) during Robespierre's reign of terror.
Further, we tend to see that Shelley has a rather idealistic view of revolution and progress, yet would fail to see how progress in itself is dialectical. All he knew was the failed French Revolution which came about full circle with the restoration of the Monarchy. Granted, he would have also known of the American Revolution, and even writes about the American Republic, considering it to be one of the freest nations in the world. However, what he does not know, and would have unlikely known, was that all the American Revolution did was simply change the faces of those in power. The position of the labourer in the United States, before and after the revolution, did not change, and in fact there was resistance from the ordinary person in the United States to actually join the fight against the British. The revolution have little to do with freedom and democracy and everything to do with free trade. If you look at the Declaration of Independence you will notice that while it will boldly proclaim that all men are created equal, the rest of the document deals primarily with economic issues with regards to trade and taxation, something which was of interest only to the landed aristocrats.
While today the United States proclaims itself as a beacon of democracy to the world, many of their wars are more about opening up markets in regions where the markets are closed. It is using the mantra of political freedom to promote not political freedom but economic freedom, that is the freedom for American corporations to come in, set up shop, and to drive out competition. It is not about justice and equality before the law, but rather about dismantling government regulation and barriers to trade. It is about driving the small, independent businessman to the wall as Walmart opens its doors across the street. It is about using patent law to ban generic drugs and to allow big pharma to provide life saving medicines at prohibitive prices.
However, we must remember the time in which Shelley was writing. This was before Marx, and the industrial revolution was only just beginning. It was still a period where the nobility held sway and the divine right of kings determined who would rule. However much had changed because the French revolution, and Napoleon, had spread the idea of political freedom across continental Europe, and the power of the king in England was giving way to the power of the Parliament. It was about spreading the ideas of the Enlightenment thinkers, and the growth in intellectual understanding of the world, and the dispelling of the superstitious myths that dominated the mind of the ordinary people. It was a world that was in flux, a world that had emerged with the superstition of the medieval ages, and was in the road to modernity, and Shelley was one of the guides who helped us move along that road.
22 April 2013
Okay, this is more a collection of his works compiled by somebody else, and many of these works did not actually see the light of day until long after Shelley died, however this particular book does give you a very broad scope of the poems, and a couple of prose essays, of Percy Shelley. Mind you, I began reading this book while I was in London because I felt that being in that marvellous city I should immerse myself in the literature that was produced there. So, wondering into Hyde Park and sitting down beside the Round Pound with a cup of tea on what was an incredibly cold morning, I opened this book and began to read his poetry. However, as it turns out, most of his work was not written in England but rather when he was in Italy (still, there is something to be said about sitting by the round pond, with a cup of tea, on a cold morning, reading Percey Shelley).
Percy Shelley had the misfortune of dying quite young. He was 29 when he died, apparently in a boating accident in the Adriatic sea, and much of his work was written in the final stages of his life, between 1818 and 1821. However, considering the length and breadth of some of his writings, it is amazing what he actually produced in such a short space of time. Now, Shelley was not a poor man, rather he was a member of the upper class who could get away with whiling his time away in Italian villas writing poetry. In those days if you wanted to be a successful writer you needed two things, an education, and free time. These days education (at least here in Australia) is much more accessible than it was in Shelley's time, and even then, you do not need to be a member of the wealthy class to succeed as an author (my friend Peter managed to do it).
Now, many people consider Shelley to be a romantic poet, and in a sense while that may be true, and while I have only read a smattering of Coleridge and Wordsworth, I must say that his poetry seems to be a lot more down to Earth than what we get from the other romantics. If Gustav Flaubert is anything to go by romantics tend to live with their heads in the clouds letting emotion pretty much rule the day, and rejecting reason and science. Shelley is somewhat different in that he is much more of a political critic, and much of his poetry demonstrates this. In fact, if he is not attacking the current government of the day, he is attacking the church, which, in a way, was very much one and the same.
For instance, he writes a poem about how during that battle of Austerlitz the Austrian and Prussian generals sat away from the battlefield in their tents directing the battle, while Napoleon was in there with his men fighting alongside them. In a way it is clear that Shelley had a great admiration for Napoleon because what Napoleon demonstrated was that he was willing to get his hands dirty, to stand with his men, and to be counted as one of them. Remember even when Napoleon was defeated and exiled to Elba, he managed to escape and return to France, and when he did this he was welcomed with open arms and once again made emperor. Even today the French still hold Napoleon on high regard.
However it is interesting that despite all of the mourning that Shelley pours out onto the page regarding the failure of the French Revolution, and the restoration of the French Monarchy in 1815, he unlikely ever actually could remember the revolution. The revolution began in 1789, though the root causes go back much further, and ended with the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 at Waterloo. Shelley died in 1822, which means that he would have been born in 1793, which means that he would have been 7 years old when Napoleon was proclaimed emperor and during his teenage years all he would have known were the Napoleonic Wars. He would not have remembered (let alone been born) during Robespierre's reign of terror.
Further, we tend to see that Shelley has a rather idealistic view of revolution and progress, yet would fail to see how progress in itself is dialectical. All he knew was the failed French Revolution which came about full circle with the restoration of the Monarchy. Granted, he would have also known of the American Revolution, and even writes about the American Republic, considering it to be one of the freest nations in the world. However, what he does not know, and would have unlikely known, was that all the American Revolution did was simply change the faces of those in power. The position of the labourer in the United States, before and after the revolution, did not change, and in fact there was resistance from the ordinary person in the United States to actually join the fight against the British. The revolution have little to do with freedom and democracy and everything to do with free trade. If you look at the Declaration of Independence you will notice that while it will boldly proclaim that all men are created equal, the rest of the document deals primarily with economic issues with regards to trade and taxation, something which was of interest only to the landed aristocrats.
While today the United States proclaims itself as a beacon of democracy to the world, many of their wars are more about opening up markets in regions where the markets are closed. It is using the mantra of political freedom to promote not political freedom but economic freedom, that is the freedom for American corporations to come in, set up shop, and to drive out competition. It is not about justice and equality before the law, but rather about dismantling government regulation and barriers to trade. It is about driving the small, independent businessman to the wall as Walmart opens its doors across the street. It is about using patent law to ban generic drugs and to allow big pharma to provide life saving medicines at prohibitive prices.
However, we must remember the time in which Shelley was writing. This was before Marx, and the industrial revolution was only just beginning. It was still a period where the nobility held sway and the divine right of kings determined who would rule. However much had changed because the French revolution, and Napoleon, had spread the idea of political freedom across continental Europe, and the power of the king in England was giving way to the power of the Parliament. It was about spreading the ideas of the Enlightenment thinkers, and the growth in intellectual understanding of the world, and the dispelling of the superstitious myths that dominated the mind of the ordinary people. It was a world that was in flux, a world that had emerged with the superstition of the medieval ages, and was in the road to modernity, and Shelley was one of the guides who helped us move along that road.
November 8, 2025
There are many excellent poets, indeed perhaps more than really there ought to be. A poem takes a minute or two to read, and sustains reflection for a few minutes; a collection of lyrics, or a longer poem, provides a few hours’ entertainment over three or four days, and then is over. A challenging but inevitable question for any work of art is: what is the point of this? For many commendable works of art there is not always a salient answer. The world is littered with such good artworks, often flawless after a discerning ken, yet which nobody would invent, were they not to exist.
Of course, the best books & paintings & films & compositions tend to render such questions patently silly. The truly great artists created works which construct inherently fascinating private universes & inspire so much excitement as to sustain endless enthusiasm from for their audiences (whatever exogenous benefits, or harms, may follow from such frequently obsessive enthusiasm); these microcosmic artistic realms often possess entire cosmologies, autistic symbologies, and something approximating metaphysical theories, all of which are relevant & applicable only unto themselves. Occasionally, their enthusiasts are inspired, perhaps apophenically, to begin seeing our waking world under the guise of their favorite artist’s demiurgy: an ardent Mahlerian may hear the symphonist’s characteristic counterpoint when a car radio blends with a nearby construction site; an esoteric Yeatsian may begin to tremble when seeing a flock of birds turning in a circular motion. The question ceases to be, What is the point of this artwork? It quickly becomes, What is the point of anything other than this artwork?
The artists who successfully operate in this world-creative manner are relatively few in number, but are all of them indefatigable treasures; among the literary world, Percy Shelley seems to sit at the nervous epicenter all poetry (or at least that of the anglosphere), filtering the corpi of Shakespeare & Spenser & Milton from the past (to say nothing of his foreign & classical influences), while supplying the basic groundwork for Yeats & Wallace Stevens. Shelley’s poetry, and its very consistent world-view & system of poetic symbolism, was drawn from nearly all that was excellent about the poets of the past, and appears to have had a substantial influence on nearly every poet who followed; subsequent tradition is abundant with constant reminiscences & allusions to many of Shelley’s fixations & motifs. One could even go so far as to join Harold Bloom in thinking that nearly all poetry has been either hyperstitional premonitions of Shelley, or else a cascading series of reactions to the enormity of his verse; yet, whatever he may be, to understand Shelley is to understand poetry writ large.
Shelley was a wunderkind, an excellent translator & scholar of classical languages from a young age, as well as a graduate of the famous private school Eton (a school which he supposedly hated, and about which one almost exclusively hears cringe-worthy Anglo hyperbole); as an adult, he shunned all of these, and contented himself with revolutionary political protest, complicated engineering expriments, intense love affairs, and a prolific amount of poetry written in his fewer than thirty years of life.
“A man knows at twenty everything he will ever really know”, wrote Yeats, and Shelley’s lengthy poem Queen Mab, written at that age, serves both to verify Yeats’ idea & to illustrate the basic poetico-philosophic paradigm in which Shelley would work for the rest of his life. The poem concerns the imagined dream of his infant daughter, Ianthe, who encounters the divine fairy Queen Mab and witnesses a number of dream visions. Being his first major poem, it serves as a comprehensive introduction to the work of its author.
The poem begins with an uneasily ecstatic identification of death with sleep, which is then connected with the question of whether immortality is possible. As the poem goes on to expound, Shelley was an rabid (almost proto-‘reddit’) atheist who decried any possibility of Christianity or existence of the ‘soul’, thus holding immortality to be scientifically & existentially nonsensical; nevertheless, his firm belief in the beautiful & the sublime nevertheless tempts him constantly toward some formulation of eternity, to which man, or mind, or whatever else, might ultimately aspire. Yet, for Shelley, whatever form this may take would be nevertheless so mysterious & nebulous that his reflections on eternity constantly carry at once the connotation of ecstatic resurrection & of demonic shadow.
As such, the poetic world-view described throughout this poem is highly associated with sleep and then, by cousinly extension, death, and finally with an agnostic vision of eternity. While these associations are not strictly rational, this ambiguous triple identity has the effect of super-charging the subsequent poetic imagery & espoused doctrines with an overly resplendent yet oneiric energy. Beautiful visions which pose complex riddles without clear answers are highly characteristic of Shelley’s poetry.
The poet seems to have vacillated about these nebulous (and somewhat vague) metaphysical dilemmas for his entire life, but the main foreground of his poetry is more concrete & coherent. Queen Mab continues with Spenserian & Miltonic (resembling Comus, l’Allegro, Epithalamion, etc more than the Faeire Queene or Paradise Lost) reveries over the beauty of nature, featuring syntactically complex sentences drawing attention to the sweeping ways in which landscapes & plants &c etc are conjoined, or to the myriad colors & effects of light that render the world so aesthetically beautiful.
To this is contrasted human society which, instead of rejoicing at the beauty & splendor of the world as Shelley does, self-segregates into feudalistic & hierarchical systems characterized by pointless slavery, suffering, and violence. Shelley views such man-made phenomena as a perverse privation of the fundamental organic goodness of the world, giving rise to speculation about the ways in which liberation might be possible; yet, on a literary level, the hyperbolic evils of society also function as poetic antithesis to the overwhelming beauty of nature. Endless swaths of blank-verse paragraphs, full of lashing consonants & infernal bombast, balance the serener imagery & delicate language of natural beauty.
The pinnacle of evil in society, here, is organized religion. For Shelley, priests & theologians are tricksters who pervert man’s ability to truly perceive or partake in beauty & nature, and redirect the mind toward abstract & arbitrary categories, falsehoods constructed for the sake of social & psychological control. To this effect, Shelley introduces a character who recurs throughout his corpus: the wandering Jew Ahasuerus, who is fabled to have been a contemporary of Moses & who has wandered the world, infinitely wise but cursed by fate, for millennia & will continue to for the rest of time.
On a surface level, Ahasuerus is an absurd counterexample in defense of Shelley’s atheistical position; he describes his life of suffering, exile, and pain, all imposed by the God of the Old Testament. If organized religion really were true, Ahaseurus would be an illustration of the folly of adherence to it; to affirm the existence of God is, for Shelley, to imagine the world to be governed by a violent & wildly cruel entity whose power amounts to cosmic horror, and whose routine activity amounts to the hateful slave-driving of mankind. On a deeper level, however, Ahasuerus serves as an highly anxious embodiment of Shelley’s metaphysical dilemma (whether immortality & eternity exist), a rag-doll proxy to explore the possibility that there are indeed supernatural forces in the world, yet which are terrifying & evil.
In practical terms, however, Shelley aligns himself with the liberalism of his day, advocating liberty & equality. His vision is less aligned with the philosophic theories of Locke & Rousseau, though he was highly sympathetic to the egalitarian violence & rabid atheism of the French Revolution; in (slightly) older age, Shelley elaborated his views more concretely in the lengthy pamphlet A Philosophic View Of Reform, where he critiques the contemporary institutional, historical, and economic situation in order to argue for the rapid implementation of a liberal republic by any means possible.
Yet Shelley’s real interest in liberalism derives from his essentially poetic vision of a crypto-socialistic society, in which human passion & artistry might flourish in perfect harmony with nature & man’s essence. His basic feeling is that man’s creative & poetic faculties, which he holds to be the ultimate good, might come to full bloom in an egalitarian society, after a complete abrogation of the unnecessary & agitating problems created by politics & organized religion. As such, the vision of a reformed (or post-revolutionary) utopian society is ultimately an abstract reverie about unlimited human freedom, resembling the hysteric visions of life after the eschaton in Blake’s prophetic books; in such a society, all people could practice free love, wander around in communion with nature. It is with this ecstatic prophecy of liberation, after which Shelley’s daughter is supposed to have wakened to embrace a life of poetic virtue, that the poem Queen Mab ends.
This early poem, then, amounts to a fully-formed poetic vision of life & the world, on which many of Shelley’s later works variate. However, while the basic liaison between the beauty of the world & the need for human freedom remain Shelley’s main fixation, the sleep-death association & the appearance of Ahasuerus point to the other side of the poet, which is fixated on the unknown, sublime, mystic, and all other forms of obscurity.
Written around the same time, the short poem O! There Are Spirits Of The Air illustrates this darker mood in a condensed format. Initially positing the existence of spirits & genii, which seem to emerge from nature, the poem gradually grows darker & darker, as the spirits are recast first as symbols of man’s pernicious envies & vain desires, then as ineffable embodiments of nature’s mutability & inhuman power. The poem concludes with a warning not to pursue these spirits for, he claims, their strange magic can only produce insanity & ruin. This is one of my favorite lyrics by Shelley, amplifying the Ahasuerus anxiety that there are indeed supernatural forces on earth, yet which are unfathomably malicious.
Shelley develops this mood of gothic-like ambiguity in his second major poem, the famous Alastor. While the poem is partly a veiled commentary on Wordsworth, and features many other allusions to the English poetic tradition, it is at bottom a purely visionary poem, almost oneirically so. The tale follows the journey of its narrator, who is one day seized by an extreme yet vague inspiration to journey east, by foot, across central Asia (the Caucuses & into present-day Kazahstan); his aim is merely to observe the natural world, and occasionally to liaison for a day or two with beautiful women met along the way.
As the lengthy poem proceeds, the visions of limestony crags & torrenting oceans become somewhat repetitive, yet the intense poetic descriptions remain so forceful as to imply that these images & their incessant recurrences form an as-yet unanswered riddle; in this way, the reader is drawn into the same eudaimonic quest as the narrator. However, the only answer comes with the death of the narrator, which results merely from old age & inclement weather, leaving him only with the uncertain anxiety that he had not quite grasped the meaning of his voyage; the poem ends in vacillating between the apparent eternity of nature & its equally apparent mutability.
Apart from the constant barrage of images & protracted sentences that make Alastor so fun to read, the merit of the poem derives from its schizophrenic heterogeneity; that is to say, there is a wide variety of entirely disparate scenes & images, which are nevertheless yoked together under the auspices of some implied mysterious, apophenic order. While the poem itself, on the manifest, does not provide any explicit elaboration as to the meaning of these visions (nor do I have personal theory to provide), this format exemplifies what is attractive & exciting about Shelley’s poetry, namely, the image of a perversely frightening & profoundly beautiful world full of impossible mysteries. Surely everyone, from time to time, feels that this is ultimately what life is.
While Harold Bloom has endlessly many things to say about Shelley’s Alastor, amounting to a theory of poetic unconsciousness tantamount to mysticism, I think a clearer analysis of this poem along such lines could instead employ Yeats’ theory of Self and Anti-Self. For Yeats, our conscious mind has its counterpart in a darker double, the Anti-Self, which is comprised of attitudes and dispositions radically different from our own, not unlike a more lugubrious styling of the Freudian Id. The task of poetry, then, becomes a competitive dance between the affinities of our conventional Selves & the unconscious intrusions of our Anti-Selves, which provide imagery & ideas which are uncharacteristic of our waking minds, and which we ourselves cannot entirely access or understand.
In the Shelleyian cosmology, then, the Self would consist in the poet’s naturalist & political perspectives as are illustrated in Queen Mab, while the Anti-Self would consist in Alastor’s uncertain & anxious tale of a fugitive amid the frighteningly strange beauty of nature; because these darker poems are less expressly opinionated or normative, but rather dream-like associations of images he finds inherently moving, they seem to illustrate his innermost spirit. Looking at Shelley this way, I think, helps to clarify that his active theories of atheistic liberalism & starry-eyed naturalism exist in a constant psychic struggle with his paranoid fear of the demonic & his visceral attachment to narratives of desperate wanderers (whether it be the dark romantic Alastor or the crypto-gnostic Ahasuerus).
Many of the rest of Shelley’s poems can be characterized by these two drives. The lengthy narrative Revolt of Islam, a convoluted story about an incestuous couple’s failed attempt at political liberation, is an heroic reframing of the political struggles forecast in Queen Mab, whereas the blank-verse-paragraph tale Julian And Maddalo portrays a mentally shattered, institutionalized poet-figure in the vein of Alastor. The Cenci, a complete five-act play written with hopes of it being staged, is so basically realist in its depiction of tyrannic evil that much of its blank verse barely reads like poetry. One can see the famous Ozymandias as a brief lyric in celebration of Shelley’s political views, while the desolate setting contrasts this with Shelley’s intense darker fixations on ruin.
The great Prometheus Unbound, a cosmic closet drama, is the apex of Shelley’s struggle against his metaphysical dilemmas. An inversion of Paradise Lost (as is explained in a prose preface), the play describes the liberation of the punished Prometheus, who in mythology is tortured daily for having first given mankind fire; this liberation entails not an Hesiod-like war among divine powers, but rather a visionary journey by Prometheus & allied natural spirits through the cosmos which, abstractly, abolishes the Olympian Gods and heralds a new era of human freedom & natural beauty.
The main substance of this work, the poetic speeches of its supernatural characters, is realized in a bizarre perversion of conventional classical chorales. The first act is primarily devoted to the spirits of the earth & nature, who scream out with desperate, pained descriptions of what they embody; this is contrasted not only with the emancipatory prophecies of Prometheus, but also the similarly cruel disputes between Hermes (here, depicted as evil) and his fearful, cringeing messengers. Much of this poetry, I find, very much resembles the second act of the second part of Goethe’s Faust8: in the classical Walpurgisnacht, as in Prometheus Unbound, Greek divinities & personified nature deliver chorales in a lofty neo-classical voice, yet for to espouse wildly anxious & occasionally demonic lamentations over the nauseating violence of nature & the Being of the world writ large, rather than the pious paeans traditionally associated with such spirits.
The climax of this Prometheus Unbound, the destruction of Zeus & his godly cohort, is the culmination of Shelley’s weltanschauung. Unlike in Shelley’s other works, the antagonist is not merely mortal tyranny, but rather a supernatural regime of malicious divinity which oppresses not only man, but nature itself (as illustrated by the suffering of the choral spirits); the overthrow of these oppressors ushers in the age of spiritual prosperity over which Shelley had long yearned, but also implies that this purification will, similarly, also restore nature to some lost primeval state.
It is unclear whether we can assume Shelley actually believed there was actually such a malign divinity, the vanquishing of which would be necessary to attain his desired utopia; like the shadowy visions of Alastor or the ‘Spirits of the Air’ throughout Shelley’s work, the poet seemed to be attracted to this symbology as a metaphor for emotional liberation, while remaining perennially uncertain about the actual nature of reality. Nevertheless, the Goetterdamerung & apotheosis of a new metaphysical order in the finale of Prometheus Unbound is the natural horizon toward which Shelley’s poetry ultimately tends; in this eschatological purgation of all evil both political & spiritual, Shelley’s supernatural anxieties are definitively overcome, and his desired utopia satisfies both his conscious & subliminal concerns.
(Shill corner: this review is too long to post here in full. You can read the full thing on my substack: https://theiconoclast.substack.com/p/...)
Of course, the best books & paintings & films & compositions tend to render such questions patently silly. The truly great artists created works which construct inherently fascinating private universes & inspire so much excitement as to sustain endless enthusiasm from for their audiences (whatever exogenous benefits, or harms, may follow from such frequently obsessive enthusiasm); these microcosmic artistic realms often possess entire cosmologies, autistic symbologies, and something approximating metaphysical theories, all of which are relevant & applicable only unto themselves. Occasionally, their enthusiasts are inspired, perhaps apophenically, to begin seeing our waking world under the guise of their favorite artist’s demiurgy: an ardent Mahlerian may hear the symphonist’s characteristic counterpoint when a car radio blends with a nearby construction site; an esoteric Yeatsian may begin to tremble when seeing a flock of birds turning in a circular motion. The question ceases to be, What is the point of this artwork? It quickly becomes, What is the point of anything other than this artwork?
The artists who successfully operate in this world-creative manner are relatively few in number, but are all of them indefatigable treasures; among the literary world, Percy Shelley seems to sit at the nervous epicenter all poetry (or at least that of the anglosphere), filtering the corpi of Shakespeare & Spenser & Milton from the past (to say nothing of his foreign & classical influences), while supplying the basic groundwork for Yeats & Wallace Stevens. Shelley’s poetry, and its very consistent world-view & system of poetic symbolism, was drawn from nearly all that was excellent about the poets of the past, and appears to have had a substantial influence on nearly every poet who followed; subsequent tradition is abundant with constant reminiscences & allusions to many of Shelley’s fixations & motifs. One could even go so far as to join Harold Bloom in thinking that nearly all poetry has been either hyperstitional premonitions of Shelley, or else a cascading series of reactions to the enormity of his verse; yet, whatever he may be, to understand Shelley is to understand poetry writ large.
Shelley was a wunderkind, an excellent translator & scholar of classical languages from a young age, as well as a graduate of the famous private school Eton (a school which he supposedly hated, and about which one almost exclusively hears cringe-worthy Anglo hyperbole); as an adult, he shunned all of these, and contented himself with revolutionary political protest, complicated engineering expriments, intense love affairs, and a prolific amount of poetry written in his fewer than thirty years of life.
“A man knows at twenty everything he will ever really know”, wrote Yeats, and Shelley’s lengthy poem Queen Mab, written at that age, serves both to verify Yeats’ idea & to illustrate the basic poetico-philosophic paradigm in which Shelley would work for the rest of his life. The poem concerns the imagined dream of his infant daughter, Ianthe, who encounters the divine fairy Queen Mab and witnesses a number of dream visions. Being his first major poem, it serves as a comprehensive introduction to the work of its author.
The poem begins with an uneasily ecstatic identification of death with sleep, which is then connected with the question of whether immortality is possible. As the poem goes on to expound, Shelley was an rabid (almost proto-‘reddit’) atheist who decried any possibility of Christianity or existence of the ‘soul’, thus holding immortality to be scientifically & existentially nonsensical; nevertheless, his firm belief in the beautiful & the sublime nevertheless tempts him constantly toward some formulation of eternity, to which man, or mind, or whatever else, might ultimately aspire. Yet, for Shelley, whatever form this may take would be nevertheless so mysterious & nebulous that his reflections on eternity constantly carry at once the connotation of ecstatic resurrection & of demonic shadow.
As such, the poetic world-view described throughout this poem is highly associated with sleep and then, by cousinly extension, death, and finally with an agnostic vision of eternity. While these associations are not strictly rational, this ambiguous triple identity has the effect of super-charging the subsequent poetic imagery & espoused doctrines with an overly resplendent yet oneiric energy. Beautiful visions which pose complex riddles without clear answers are highly characteristic of Shelley’s poetry.
The poet seems to have vacillated about these nebulous (and somewhat vague) metaphysical dilemmas for his entire life, but the main foreground of his poetry is more concrete & coherent. Queen Mab continues with Spenserian & Miltonic (resembling Comus, l’Allegro, Epithalamion, etc more than the Faeire Queene or Paradise Lost) reveries over the beauty of nature, featuring syntactically complex sentences drawing attention to the sweeping ways in which landscapes & plants &c etc are conjoined, or to the myriad colors & effects of light that render the world so aesthetically beautiful.
To this is contrasted human society which, instead of rejoicing at the beauty & splendor of the world as Shelley does, self-segregates into feudalistic & hierarchical systems characterized by pointless slavery, suffering, and violence. Shelley views such man-made phenomena as a perverse privation of the fundamental organic goodness of the world, giving rise to speculation about the ways in which liberation might be possible; yet, on a literary level, the hyperbolic evils of society also function as poetic antithesis to the overwhelming beauty of nature. Endless swaths of blank-verse paragraphs, full of lashing consonants & infernal bombast, balance the serener imagery & delicate language of natural beauty.
The pinnacle of evil in society, here, is organized religion. For Shelley, priests & theologians are tricksters who pervert man’s ability to truly perceive or partake in beauty & nature, and redirect the mind toward abstract & arbitrary categories, falsehoods constructed for the sake of social & psychological control. To this effect, Shelley introduces a character who recurs throughout his corpus: the wandering Jew Ahasuerus, who is fabled to have been a contemporary of Moses & who has wandered the world, infinitely wise but cursed by fate, for millennia & will continue to for the rest of time.
On a surface level, Ahasuerus is an absurd counterexample in defense of Shelley’s atheistical position; he describes his life of suffering, exile, and pain, all imposed by the God of the Old Testament. If organized religion really were true, Ahaseurus would be an illustration of the folly of adherence to it; to affirm the existence of God is, for Shelley, to imagine the world to be governed by a violent & wildly cruel entity whose power amounts to cosmic horror, and whose routine activity amounts to the hateful slave-driving of mankind. On a deeper level, however, Ahasuerus serves as an highly anxious embodiment of Shelley’s metaphysical dilemma (whether immortality & eternity exist), a rag-doll proxy to explore the possibility that there are indeed supernatural forces in the world, yet which are terrifying & evil.
In practical terms, however, Shelley aligns himself with the liberalism of his day, advocating liberty & equality. His vision is less aligned with the philosophic theories of Locke & Rousseau, though he was highly sympathetic to the egalitarian violence & rabid atheism of the French Revolution; in (slightly) older age, Shelley elaborated his views more concretely in the lengthy pamphlet A Philosophic View Of Reform, where he critiques the contemporary institutional, historical, and economic situation in order to argue for the rapid implementation of a liberal republic by any means possible.
Yet Shelley’s real interest in liberalism derives from his essentially poetic vision of a crypto-socialistic society, in which human passion & artistry might flourish in perfect harmony with nature & man’s essence. His basic feeling is that man’s creative & poetic faculties, which he holds to be the ultimate good, might come to full bloom in an egalitarian society, after a complete abrogation of the unnecessary & agitating problems created by politics & organized religion. As such, the vision of a reformed (or post-revolutionary) utopian society is ultimately an abstract reverie about unlimited human freedom, resembling the hysteric visions of life after the eschaton in Blake’s prophetic books; in such a society, all people could practice free love, wander around in communion with nature. It is with this ecstatic prophecy of liberation, after which Shelley’s daughter is supposed to have wakened to embrace a life of poetic virtue, that the poem Queen Mab ends.
This early poem, then, amounts to a fully-formed poetic vision of life & the world, on which many of Shelley’s later works variate. However, while the basic liaison between the beauty of the world & the need for human freedom remain Shelley’s main fixation, the sleep-death association & the appearance of Ahasuerus point to the other side of the poet, which is fixated on the unknown, sublime, mystic, and all other forms of obscurity.
Written around the same time, the short poem O! There Are Spirits Of The Air illustrates this darker mood in a condensed format. Initially positing the existence of spirits & genii, which seem to emerge from nature, the poem gradually grows darker & darker, as the spirits are recast first as symbols of man’s pernicious envies & vain desires, then as ineffable embodiments of nature’s mutability & inhuman power. The poem concludes with a warning not to pursue these spirits for, he claims, their strange magic can only produce insanity & ruin. This is one of my favorite lyrics by Shelley, amplifying the Ahasuerus anxiety that there are indeed supernatural forces on earth, yet which are unfathomably malicious.
Shelley develops this mood of gothic-like ambiguity in his second major poem, the famous Alastor. While the poem is partly a veiled commentary on Wordsworth, and features many other allusions to the English poetic tradition, it is at bottom a purely visionary poem, almost oneirically so. The tale follows the journey of its narrator, who is one day seized by an extreme yet vague inspiration to journey east, by foot, across central Asia (the Caucuses & into present-day Kazahstan); his aim is merely to observe the natural world, and occasionally to liaison for a day or two with beautiful women met along the way.
As the lengthy poem proceeds, the visions of limestony crags & torrenting oceans become somewhat repetitive, yet the intense poetic descriptions remain so forceful as to imply that these images & their incessant recurrences form an as-yet unanswered riddle; in this way, the reader is drawn into the same eudaimonic quest as the narrator. However, the only answer comes with the death of the narrator, which results merely from old age & inclement weather, leaving him only with the uncertain anxiety that he had not quite grasped the meaning of his voyage; the poem ends in vacillating between the apparent eternity of nature & its equally apparent mutability.
Apart from the constant barrage of images & protracted sentences that make Alastor so fun to read, the merit of the poem derives from its schizophrenic heterogeneity; that is to say, there is a wide variety of entirely disparate scenes & images, which are nevertheless yoked together under the auspices of some implied mysterious, apophenic order. While the poem itself, on the manifest, does not provide any explicit elaboration as to the meaning of these visions (nor do I have personal theory to provide), this format exemplifies what is attractive & exciting about Shelley’s poetry, namely, the image of a perversely frightening & profoundly beautiful world full of impossible mysteries. Surely everyone, from time to time, feels that this is ultimately what life is.
While Harold Bloom has endlessly many things to say about Shelley’s Alastor, amounting to a theory of poetic unconsciousness tantamount to mysticism, I think a clearer analysis of this poem along such lines could instead employ Yeats’ theory of Self and Anti-Self. For Yeats, our conscious mind has its counterpart in a darker double, the Anti-Self, which is comprised of attitudes and dispositions radically different from our own, not unlike a more lugubrious styling of the Freudian Id. The task of poetry, then, becomes a competitive dance between the affinities of our conventional Selves & the unconscious intrusions of our Anti-Selves, which provide imagery & ideas which are uncharacteristic of our waking minds, and which we ourselves cannot entirely access or understand.
In the Shelleyian cosmology, then, the Self would consist in the poet’s naturalist & political perspectives as are illustrated in Queen Mab, while the Anti-Self would consist in Alastor’s uncertain & anxious tale of a fugitive amid the frighteningly strange beauty of nature; because these darker poems are less expressly opinionated or normative, but rather dream-like associations of images he finds inherently moving, they seem to illustrate his innermost spirit. Looking at Shelley this way, I think, helps to clarify that his active theories of atheistic liberalism & starry-eyed naturalism exist in a constant psychic struggle with his paranoid fear of the demonic & his visceral attachment to narratives of desperate wanderers (whether it be the dark romantic Alastor or the crypto-gnostic Ahasuerus).
Many of the rest of Shelley’s poems can be characterized by these two drives. The lengthy narrative Revolt of Islam, a convoluted story about an incestuous couple’s failed attempt at political liberation, is an heroic reframing of the political struggles forecast in Queen Mab, whereas the blank-verse-paragraph tale Julian And Maddalo portrays a mentally shattered, institutionalized poet-figure in the vein of Alastor. The Cenci, a complete five-act play written with hopes of it being staged, is so basically realist in its depiction of tyrannic evil that much of its blank verse barely reads like poetry. One can see the famous Ozymandias as a brief lyric in celebration of Shelley’s political views, while the desolate setting contrasts this with Shelley’s intense darker fixations on ruin.
The great Prometheus Unbound, a cosmic closet drama, is the apex of Shelley’s struggle against his metaphysical dilemmas. An inversion of Paradise Lost (as is explained in a prose preface), the play describes the liberation of the punished Prometheus, who in mythology is tortured daily for having first given mankind fire; this liberation entails not an Hesiod-like war among divine powers, but rather a visionary journey by Prometheus & allied natural spirits through the cosmos which, abstractly, abolishes the Olympian Gods and heralds a new era of human freedom & natural beauty.
The main substance of this work, the poetic speeches of its supernatural characters, is realized in a bizarre perversion of conventional classical chorales. The first act is primarily devoted to the spirits of the earth & nature, who scream out with desperate, pained descriptions of what they embody; this is contrasted not only with the emancipatory prophecies of Prometheus, but also the similarly cruel disputes between Hermes (here, depicted as evil) and his fearful, cringeing messengers. Much of this poetry, I find, very much resembles the second act of the second part of Goethe’s Faust8: in the classical Walpurgisnacht, as in Prometheus Unbound, Greek divinities & personified nature deliver chorales in a lofty neo-classical voice, yet for to espouse wildly anxious & occasionally demonic lamentations over the nauseating violence of nature & the Being of the world writ large, rather than the pious paeans traditionally associated with such spirits.
The climax of this Prometheus Unbound, the destruction of Zeus & his godly cohort, is the culmination of Shelley’s weltanschauung. Unlike in Shelley’s other works, the antagonist is not merely mortal tyranny, but rather a supernatural regime of malicious divinity which oppresses not only man, but nature itself (as illustrated by the suffering of the choral spirits); the overthrow of these oppressors ushers in the age of spiritual prosperity over which Shelley had long yearned, but also implies that this purification will, similarly, also restore nature to some lost primeval state.
It is unclear whether we can assume Shelley actually believed there was actually such a malign divinity, the vanquishing of which would be necessary to attain his desired utopia; like the shadowy visions of Alastor or the ‘Spirits of the Air’ throughout Shelley’s work, the poet seemed to be attracted to this symbology as a metaphor for emotional liberation, while remaining perennially uncertain about the actual nature of reality. Nevertheless, the Goetterdamerung & apotheosis of a new metaphysical order in the finale of Prometheus Unbound is the natural horizon toward which Shelley’s poetry ultimately tends; in this eschatological purgation of all evil both political & spiritual, Shelley’s supernatural anxieties are definitively overcome, and his desired utopia satisfies both his conscious & subliminal concerns.
(Shill corner: this review is too long to post here in full. You can read the full thing on my substack: https://theiconoclast.substack.com/p/...)
May 15, 2023
Her use of language and imagery is stupendous
From her poem "Ode to the West Wind":
"Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies"
Shelley's words in this poem beautifully capture the healing power of nature and its ability to inspire and awaken the human spirit.
On the downside, her poems can be quite dense and require multiple readings to fully grasp their meaning. Nevertheless, for those who appreciate the beauty and complexity of the written word, Shelley's poetry is definitely worth exploring.
From her poem "Ode to the West Wind":
"Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies"
Shelley's words in this poem beautifully capture the healing power of nature and its ability to inspire and awaken the human spirit.
On the downside, her poems can be quite dense and require multiple readings to fully grasp their meaning. Nevertheless, for those who appreciate the beauty and complexity of the written word, Shelley's poetry is definitely worth exploring.
August 20, 2023
mudou a trajetória da minha vida para pior (te amo percy bysshe shelley byron)
December 31, 2024
How better can we define the failure of the poet than his writing of The Triumph of Life being so sorely interrupted by his death? Is this not the acme of poetic meagreness? So I begin my Attack on Poetry, in which I find such winding words of little concourse with matters of reality. I wonder whether Shelley’s poetry has ever moved a man to action; alas – alas for my attack – I must say yes. I must say that some intellectual radical was spurred into his intellectual radicality by these words. I suspect had I been waterboarded by Shelley aged 16 I would have joined their ranks; I regret in some way that I wasn’t. Then I was a bed of mud so primed to receive these thoughts, in this order, and this manner. Now I am a fallow field, too far removed, too analytical in the abstract sense. I am lost to the war. But how vividly Shelley conjures it. To look alone at the political works, those works scattered with ruins and history, through which all lines pend to English Liberty, in which no crown will survive unmelted, in which all men will be free. It is a broad, Utopian poetry that England has rarely known; it is a willing javelin against God, King, Law – all those scourges that are so enshrined in the English decorum. Look merely over to Keats, who travels instead in and around the sensory, losing in that any sense of a past or present outside of the mythological infinite. Keats dwelt his short life in pastures aesthetic. Shelley begins and ends his mission with the clenched fist: he decries frequently; with all the poetic energy of Keats, but pointed in its ecstasy toward a greater, practical, physical victory. The acme – Prometheus Unbound – is this notion made flesh. A long, winding poem, in which the political object is tied up in the most inspired, the most lush verse conceivable: all of nature, of heaven and earth, is tied up into the single ecstatic moment, all is driving toward the total vision that might remove (or simply brush) the painted veil so frequently mentioned. If his language is, in some cases, taffled in long and obscure lines of ideology; if he is sometimes a poet of Orbs and Notions and Lofty Ideals, he imbues these with such wings and such airs. There is at times a sense of Dante’s Paradiso – gleams of a remoter world. Though there is a great variety also, despite the failure of life; he ventures into theatre (with one play performable, though the others yet more beautiful in their impossibility); he strays into obscure genres in which to render obscure subjects. What can be said of The Witch of Atlas, which spends so many lines describing the birth of a Hermaphrodite, who with wings leads a boat up rivers and hills? The supposed subject of this poem, that subject most frequently gleaned, only occurs in its last few (of so many) stanzas; the rest appears rather an expression of abstract aesthetic features; something like an opiate vision given all unnecessary tassels. His Adonais floats with overabundance: indeed, it contains within it extraordinarily touching passages, and then much else surplus to feeling – there must be several good poems hidden within one rather less even one. I can detect the moral condemnation flung against Shelley most sharply in his Epipsychidion: a vein of starlit romance that feels itself compelled, in being so, to justify Shelley’s sexual ideology, by which he is perfectly capable – indeed that he ought to – keep multiple partners, all of whom contributing to his galaxy of lovers. Here is a twining of a poetry imbued with abundant feeling and a poetry compelled to wheel its way into abstract dealings and justifications; it is not sufficient that the poet experience this thing without its philosophical underpinning being made part of that texture; this makes for a pair with his political poetry – in which the ecstasy of freedom is knotted with the justice of its acquisition – though here given a curiously personal application. Indeed there is a sense in Shelley of a poet floating away, not only from an audience but from his own world; his verse is so dextrous, and so ingenious, that he finds no impediment to far-off fancy. In such cloudy regions it is perhaps easy to lose oneself in the shaping of clouds. But I am taken by his commitment in this madness; in the scale and the continuity of his effort. He matures swiftly (swifter than Keats) and persists at an even keel until the grisly end; that finale – the midst of The Triumph of Life – is itself a wonderful reflection of Bruegel’s opposite work. We envision a great canvas of skeletal walkers, some in the shade of this passing chariot, some in pursuit, some being pursued. To my view it takes on a similar colour, an earthen clay, mottled with darker creeks, and sunken eyes. Much alike Keats, there is some impressive quality to the moment of accidental-death: The Triumph of Life cuts off just as the poet begins to describe the essential meaning of his subject. Once more, those unheard melodies rattle in the pits.
September 8, 2019
I like Percy Shelley and he has written some of my favourite poems but I found this quite heavy going and a bit much so I skimmed through some of it.
I did really enjoy The Cenci play. I thought that was really good and it kept me gripped.
My favourite poem would be The Mask of Anarchy.
I enjoyed the introduction as well.
One for diehard Shelley fans.
I did really enjoy The Cenci play. I thought that was really good and it kept me gripped.
My favourite poem would be The Mask of Anarchy.
I enjoyed the introduction as well.
One for diehard Shelley fans.
April 12, 2017
Possibly my favorite poet ever ???? Idk
November 11, 2020
As the title says, this is the collection of shelley's major work. I'm not a huge fan of his work, especially the longer stuff, but there is no doubt there is some great poams in here that proves shelley's talent. ~ "Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude" "Mutability" "Mont Blanc" "Ozymandias" "The Mask of Anarchy" "Ode to the West Wind" "The Sensitive Plant" "The Cloud" "To a Skylark" "Adonais" "To (The Serpent is shut out from paradise)" and "With a Guitar-To Jane".
March 12, 2019
A great Romantic, the passionate Shelley shows lyrical brilliance and provides profound depth. His “Adonais” is an inspiring poem, commemorating his contemporary Keats. Shelley is another great English writer who gravitated to the beauty of wondrous Italy.
April 15, 2019
أي رأي فيه أو تقريظ له يغض من شأنه الرفيع وقدره العظيم .
June 12, 2019
Great edition with a thought provoking introduction by two major Shelley scholars and an helpful set of notes
March 15, 2020
A Defence of Poetry is contained. Very Good Reads.
October 16, 2020
Gandhi learned political action thru passive resistance from Shelley, I was informed by this book.
November 27, 2024
First read: August 2024 - November 2024
Thoughts to come.
Thoughts to come.
Did Not Finish
January 14, 2025DNF until after graduation
October 5, 2025
‘What profit can you see in hating such a hatless thing as me?’ This guy needs to get over himself.
July 8, 2026
A comprehensive collection of Shelley's work that for me had a poor and overly-complicated introduction to be beginner friendly, as someone fairly new to Shelley's poetry.
January 9, 2013
I gave this a three-star rating because this edition does not give a good understanding of Shelley's publishing history. While it does include all of the 'major works', it is not the best edition I would recommend for a Shelley enthusiast, especially as the Oxford editions, while pretty, are not very well constructed for exhaustive reading (in which case the paperback becomes very worn and tattered and thereby loses its chief benefit, which was looking pretty).
July 29, 2020
reread recently and I'm tempted to bring him to korea with me...
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