His exploration of this central idea of his poetics in A Defence of Poetry concludes that the artist must engage critically with contemporary realities if art is to remain relevant: his task is ‘to create afresh the associations’ that words and images and ideas have acquired over time if they are not to become ‘dead to all the nobler purposes of human intercourse’ (here). On this view, all imaginative creation, and poetry pre-eminently, is at once determined by and able to determine how we apprehend the world in which we live; it

purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being. It compels us to feel that which we perceive, and to imagine that which we know. It creates anew the universe after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by re-iteration. (here)

The primary task of poetry is to absorb and transform its sources in nature, art and thought, past and present, into instruments for knowing the world as it has become; in effect bringing a new reality into being. The corollary of these visionary, creative and ethical functions is Shelley’s celebrated declaration that ‘Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World’ (here).

Fundamental to this creative enterprise as he conceived it was an original engagement with poetic form. In this Shelley followed the example of the writers he regarded as having defined the age as one of exceptional imaginative power, for a distinguishing hallmark of the Romantic period was the extent of its experimentation with genre, style and versification. To deploy these effectively requires an alert awareness of decorum – that is, of the language, narrative structures, characters, prosody (and so on) which tradition had established as proper to a given literary kind. Not that these conventions simply dictate the attributes of a given Shelley poem: many of his most memorable effects involve the revision, even subversion, of received styles and stories, of genre itself. His awareness of traditional prescriptions always remains acute, however, and his characteristic impulse is to test the limits of the convention within which he works. Harold Bloom’s contention that our reading of Shelley’s verse ought above all to remain conscious of its relation to the history of poetry is pertinent here.37 Shelley’s handling of a traditional form both bears the impress of the age and functions as a searching means of exploring it.

His variations on the ballad form offer a signal example. Historically, a leading theme of the popular ballad was mockery of the great as a means of social protest, Shelley’s object in ‘The Monarch’s funeral: An Anticipation’ (1810), in which a contrast between the pomp and luxury of royalty and the obscure grave of the true patriot is developed. The Mask of Anarchy, written in the immediate aftermath of the Peterloo Massacre of August 1819, elicits a more variously nuanced response. It combines the simplicity of language and relaxed versification of the ballad style with elements of biblical dream vision, courtly masque and public pageant to form a generic hybrid in which those heterogeneous elements interact to mimic the discontinuities and dissonances of the socially fractured encounter they commemorate. Traditionally the ballad also served as vehicle for the narration of local events of an apparently supernatural character. Such was Wordsworth’s tale, in a five-line expansion of the ballad stanza, of the conversion to an upright life of an itinerant seller of earthenware pots in Peter Bell (1819), whose imminent publication prompted Shelley to recast the tale in Peter Bell the Third, with a stricter rhyme scheme and a farcical caricature of Wordsworth himself as chief personage. In Shelley’s reworking, the pedlar’s conversion has been replaced with Wordsworth’s passage from reformist to conservative politics, the consequent dullness of his poetry being his fitting recompense. Within a narrower compass, Shelley was a determined experimenter in the sonnet form. None of the nine sonnets included in the present selection follows the same rhyme scheme, and only the translation ‘From the Italian of Dante’ conforms to a major traditional pattern of rhyme – the Shakespearean (abab cdcd efef gg) – though not to its division into three quatrains and a concluding couplet. Nor do any of the sonnets respect the Petrarchan model’s division into octave and sestet, rhyming abba abba cdecde. The distinctive effects that Shelley achieves through innovative rhyming and unexpected divisions of sense in his sonnets reward close attention.

So does his management of other, even more intricate forms. The poems that Shelley composed between 1809 and 1812, which include the first thirteen titles in this volume, display a remarkable spectrum of metres, stanzas and rhyme schemes, a prelude to the continued development in technical ingenuity and control throughout his career. The skill with which he negotiates the prosodic variations over forty lines on only three rhymes in ‘Written on hearing the news of the death of Napoleon’ represents a quite astonishing example, as if the masterly display of the poet’s art carried through in the poem’s five stanzas rendered homage to the prodigious existence of the subject that is recalled. As remarkable, in their different ways, are his sustained handling of the solemn fifteen-line stanzas of ‘Ode to Liberty’, and the rapid verbal music and lightness of rhythm he creates in ‘The Cloud’. The interplay of the iambic pentameter couplets of Julian and Maddalo with what Shelley described as the poem’s ‘familiar style of language’ is as exhilarating as the animated conversation of the two principals as they ride along the shore of the Venetian Lido through wind-blown sunny spray.38 Exhilarating too, though in quite another mode, is the fanciful journey of the lady witch in The Witch of Atlas, in which the delighted play and gleeful mischief generated by the confrontation between the things of this world and the creative imagination are brilliantly adapted to the Italian comic measure of ottava rima.

Such experimentation and formal diversity are the principal medium through which Shelley constructs the substantial autobiographical dimension of his verse. In the course of his correspondence with his future father-in-law, William Godwin, in early 1812, he suggests that an account of the whole of a life from youth to age, recording successive intellectual and sentimental states when and as they are experienced, would possess a scientific value to rival that of systematic studies of mental phenomena:

If any man would determine sincerely and cautiously at every period of his life to publish books which should contain the real state of his feelings and opinions, I am willing to suppose that this portraiture of his mind would be worth many metaphysical disquisitions.39

Shelley was acutely conscious of the obstacles in the way of carrying out such a scheme, as well as the related one of reconstituting a life through methodical recollection. In a series of notes on the science of mind, he writes that ‘thought can with difficulty visit the intricate and winding chambers which it inhabits’.40 And he was especially aware, both in the exercise of self-reflection and more generally, of the imperfections of language itself as an expressive instrument: ‘These words inefficient & metaphorical—Most words so—No help—’, as he put it in a manuscript footnote to ‘On Love’. Such caveats notwithstanding, self-portraiture forms a major strain in his verse and prose and one to which he returns at critical intervals. The poems that embody this continuing impulse range from the explicitly autobiographical first-person meditations of ‘The Retrospect: Cwm Elan 1812’ and the Dedication before Laon and Cythna, through the formal portraits of himself as Poet speaking to his public in the prefaces to Laon and Cythna and Prometheus Unbound, the imaginative working-through of an interval of personal grief in ‘Lines Written among the Euganean Hills, October, 1818’ , or the lament from a moment of deep despondency in ‘Stanzas Written in Dejection—December 1818, near Naples’, to the highly wrought symbolic narratives of Epipsychidion (1821). A pivotal event in the construction of his life story as possessing significant shape and purpose is recounted in both ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ (1816) and the Dedication before Laon and Cythna.