Selected Poems and Prose pdf Percy Bysshe Shelley Free Download

The eldest child of a family of landed gentry in West Sussex, PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY (1792–1822) was heir to a considerable fortune and, from 1806, to a baronetcy. The major directions of his thought and writings were formed early. At Eton (1804–10), where he was teased and bullied by the other boys, he developed (encouraged by the enlightened physician Dr James Lind) an enthusiasm for contemporary science, began to read radical writers, published a short Gothic novel and, on leaving school, collaborated with his sister on his first volume of verse. Matriculating at University College, Oxford, in autumn 1810, he became a close friend of Thomas Jefferson Hogg, with whom he wrote and distributed the pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism, leading to their joint expulsion from the university in March 1811. In August of that year Shelley eloped with the sixteen-year-old Harriet Westbrook, precipitating a rupture of relations with his family. During a visit to Ireland in February–March 1812 he agitated for Catholic emancipation and repeal of the Union with England and distributed political pamphlets he had written for the purpose, an early instance of a life-long engagement with liberal politics. Shelley’s first major poem, the radical, anti-religious and visionary Queen Mab (1813), was printed and distributed privately. In July 1814 he left London to travel in France and Switzerland with his future wife Mary Godwin and her step-sister, Claire Clairmont.

Following his grandfather’s death in 1815, Shelley inherited a substantial sum and was provided with a regular income, both of which he shared generously. The following summer he spent with Byron in Switzerland, beginning a complex and challenging friendship that lasted until Shelley’s death. Another lasting friendship, with the poet, essayist and editor Leigh Hunt, introduced him to a group of writers that included John Keats and William Hazlitt. After leaving England in March 1818, the Shelleys travelled widely in Italy before settling at Pisa. During these final years of his life he produced a series of masterpieces which include Prometheus Unbound, Adonais, The Triumph of Life and A Defence of Poetry. Shelley drowned off the north-west coast of Italy in July 1822.

JACK DONOVAN was formerly Reader in English at the University of York (UK), having previously taught at universities in the United States and France. He has written on French and English Sentimental and Romantic literature and is currently one of the editorial team preparing a complete annotated edition of Shelley’s poetry.

CIAN DUFFY is Professor of English Literature at Lund University, Sweden. He has written on various aspects of British Romantic-period literature and is currently working on the relationship between romanticisms and romantic nationalisms in Britain and the Nordic countries.

Introduction

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When Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned off the north-west coast of Italy in July 1822, just a month short of his thirtieth birthday, he left behind a quantity of poetry and prose as remarkable for substance and scope as for intellectual range and formal diversity. In a literary career of little more than a dozen years, Shelley produced some 450 finished poems and verse fragments. These extend across virtually the entire spectrum of genres and modes practised in the Romantic period: dream vision and epic-romance, tragic and comic verse drama, political ballad, satirical squib, popular song, funeral elegy, allegory, confessional autobiography, ode and hymn; occasional pieces on both private and public themes; sentimental, mythological and symbolic narratives; conversation poems, meditative and topical sonnets – as well as the exquisitely crafted brief lyrics for which he is mostly remembered. Shelley also made a number of verse translations – from Greek and Latin, Italian, Spanish and German, including a number of the Homeric Hymns and passages of Virgil, Dante, Calderón and Goethe. His work in prose includes two Gothic novels and several shorter fictional narratives; political pamphlets; metaphysical and psychological speculation; translations of Platonic dialogues; critical essays on subjects as varied as religious belief, vegetarianism, sexuality, the Devil and diabolism, and brief considerations of several others – as well as the classic of English literary theory, A Defence of Poetry.

Shelley’s extraordinary output has come to be recognized as one of the major literary contributions to the English Romantic Movement, and his poetry in particular as boldly original, technically accomplished and critically challenging – altogether a brilliantly distinctive reinterpretation of the European poetic tradition. Such was not the case in Shelley’s lifetime, however, when a number of factors combined to deny him the audience that he persisted in seeking in the face of both widespread disregard and outright hostility. Both material and cultural factors account for the neglect of his writing by his contemporaries. Much of the verse and prose that now forms the basis of his reputation was not published until after his death. The Mask of Anarchy, for example, written in autumn 1819 as a response to the ‘Peterloo Massacre’ in Manchester, was withheld for fear of prosecution until 1832. Julian and Maddalo, The Witch of Atlas, Peter Bell the Third, ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’ and A Defence of Poetry did not appear until Mary Shelley’s editions of her late husband’s work in 1824, 1839 and 1840. Other examples of posthumous publication, including most of Shelley’s lyric poetry, could be cited. The dozen volumes of his verse that did appear in his lifetime, almost all of them at his own expense (the usual practice at the time for an author untried in the marketplace), sold poorly, and that in an age when poetry could and did earn both critical esteem and commercial success for lesser talents than his – setting aside the remarkable status attained by major figures like Thomas Moore, Walter Scott and Lord Byron.1 The highly controversial subject matter of several of Shelley’s most ambitious works was another obstacle to recognition, established booksellers being averse to the financial and legal risk of publishing them.

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Percy Bysshe Shelley