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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
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About the author
Percy Bysshe Shelley
1,613 books1,387 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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November 22, 2015
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.
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.
dnf
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.
January 3, 2014
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).
August 17, 2024
reread recently and I'm tempted to bring him to korea with me...
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews