Shelley on Love

An Anthology

Shelley Percy Bysshe

"Shelley's conception of love lies at the heart of his radical views on social justice, political liberty, and poetry itself". In bringing together for the first time Shelley's almost unknown prose writings on love, Richard Holmes presents an intellectual and emotional portrait of a great poet's beliefs and personality developing from adolescence to the threshold of maturity, when at the age of thirty they were tragically cut short.

The anthology does not merely give a Romantic poet's view of romantic passion, but treats of Love at large, in all its forms and manifestations. The collection is divided biographically into six thematic sections, so that the reader may follow closely the development of Shelley's views in response to his experiences. Shelley's wonderfully graceful version of Plato's "Symposium" is rescued from obscurity, and three telling extracts from his lesser-read long poems serve to crystallize his attitudes to love at critical points.

About the Author

One of the Titans of English romanticism, Shelley was born in 1792. Radical in his social and political veiws as well as his poetry, he was expelled from University College Oxford in 1911 after publishing a pamphlet titled "The Necessity of Atheism". He went on to produce some of the most esteemed works ever written in the English Language, including "Ozimandias", "England in 1819" and "Don Juan", as well as become the close friend of contemporary Lord Byron and the husband of Mary Shelley. He died in 1822 at the age of 29, drowning off the coast of Italy.

Back to the list of books