Percy Bysshe Shelley Books

I waited almost 20 years to track down this book. My advice to you, Reader, is don't wait a single minute. "Footsteps" is delightful from multiple vantage points. Holmes is a fine, empathic writer who reveals the inner workings of the process of biography. He is also an insightful travel writer with a strong sense of place. While I greatly enjoyed his chapter on Robert Louis Stevenson, I was fascinated by his treatment of Gerard de Nerval. This is one literary byway that should not be missed.

Richard Holmes is a man profoundly obsessed with other people's lives. This book reflects the process of how the author struggled to come to terms with the mysterious past which is flitting away from us. It is also a book which tries to answer the question "Why should it matter?"

Whether hunting for the Shelleys in Italy or pursuing Stevenson in the Cevennes, Holmes manages to convey the feeling that it does matter, that these people had their share in shaping European culture and literature.

However, there is a price to be paid if one aims to bring ghosts back to life. The author is ever balancing on the fine edge of cutting himself off from the present, of falling into the abyss of the past and never wake up again, and he is painfully aware of this.

Holmes seems to conceive of biography as a temporary annihilation of his own self in order to grasp the world that his subjects moved in. The literary outcome is a great and full picture. On a personal level, it is trauma.

This book will (if it is not already) be a classic for anyone remotely interested in reading or writing biography.

This is the kind of book at which Holmes, in my view, excels. I'm not that particularly fond of his painstaking mammoth biographies of Shelley and Coleridge because, well, they're too run-of-the-mill and not all that much fun to read.-In other words, just the opposite of books like this one. This type of book, where the relationship between Holmes and the author he is writing about is constantly in play add a mystery and a haunted quality inherent in the time elapsed between Holmes' time and the author's that keeps the readers attention constantly transfixed (or, at least, this reader's). As Holmes himself puts it, "The material surfaces of life are continually breaking down, sloughing off, changing, almost as fast as human skin." Examples: The passage on Shelley's view of the double, the "ghost of the living person" the view of which signified the shadow world invading this one; Shelley's view that this is what was happening to him just before he drowned himself is the most affecting passage I've read on Shelley's end, and together with the photograph of the Casa Magni, which I'd never actually seen, and whose setting Mary Shelley said caused them to be in touch with the unreal sent shivers up my spine. It's not to be missed.-The section on Nerval was also interesting, as were the others. Curiously, the same sort of thing seems to have affected Nerval "...Here began for me what I shall call the overflowing of dreams into real life." Both sections are excellent and Holmes' speculation that "Nerval's whole work was a form of suicide note" seems right on the mark. The other sections are intriguing as well, but these two haunted me the most. In a moment of brave self-exposure where Holmes is following Shelley's footsteps in Rome, he recounts a dinner where they toasted Shelley as a fellow-exile and his name "rang to the roof." Holmes writes, "I sat there looking at my plate dangerously close to tears. I...determined to write a book for people like them too, who would never read it, people who have lost most things except hope."-You've succeeded Mr Holmes.

Beginning with a journey tracing Stevenson's walking tour in France, Holmes shows himself to be both a remarkable adventurer and writer. The thing that comes out clearly when he discovers the ruins of a bridge crossed by Stevenson is that the past is the past. And while it has an impact on the world today, it is gone. If you only read it for the first essay, it is well worth the money. The other essays explore other themes that affect biographers. A superb book that should be read by anyone interested in the mysrerious relationship between biographer and subject.

I read this the spring it came out, the spring I learned that once again there would be no summer vacation, no breaking free of the time zone. As much as a book can stand in for actual experience, this did, and I got a rollicking review of Romantic figures in the bargain. Holmes obviously conducts meticulous research, but he writes it up in a style that has the sweep of a fine novel. He is a master at marrying study and action.

Percy Bysshe Shelley is undoubtedly one of the double handful of master poets of the English language. He's something more to many of us, a figure of great charisma and daring who spent his life in relentless search of a better way to be than what we're perpetually settling for, politically, erotically, personally. This quest took him into several flavors of exile, and into darker places within; early on he abandoned belief and near the end, some say, abandoned hope. But he wrote what it was like all the way through, and what it should be like, and why writing what it should be like is crucial. He searched always for the road forward, refusing the easy lie of naming the ground beneath his feet that road. Not that he was what we would call an existentialist: his vision of what might prove possible in life marries all the little-but-infinite scenes of love, discovery, and sublimity he'd experienced and never forgotten, and was always at work recasting in stronger and surer words and images.

His most important writings are mid-length and longer pieces. This is something of a paradox as all agree he is anyone's equal as a lyric poet. I recommend his crazy, brilliant early poem "Alastor" as a beginning point. It sketches out the quest he never left off from and gives a heavy, tonic dose of poetry as he conceived it: a stripping off of fear, remorse and all other artificial limits, including those of our very senses, and a dive into the furious streaming colliding fires of the true world to find what's lost there. It's a bit like the visionary journey the astronaut takes near the end of the film 2001. Without the fetus.

This is a great selection, omitting little of importance. The first edition carried all the same poems, but a mostly different set of critical essays. A slightly fuller selection is in print in the Oxford World's Classics series, with less critical apparatus for those who like to go it alone. Shelley's works have a tangled textual history, so I'd advise going with these professional selections and no other (two editions of Shelley's complete works are finally in progress, I'm happy to say).

If you only buy one book of Shelley's works -- make it this one.

This edition contains all Shelley's major poetry, as well as three essays (see table of contents on this page).

The bonus is that, as this is a critical edition, it also contains 15 brief critical essays, which are among the best explications you'll find of Shelley's work. (Since it's a critical edition, the poems are also heavily footnoted, something you'll either love or hate.)

The only downside is that a number of Shelley's shorter and lighter poems are absent (e.g., "Love's Philosophy"), and only a small portion of "Laon and Cyntha" appears here -- but overall the selection is solid. And, like all the Norton critical editions, this is printed on decent paper, eye-straining, tissue-thin stock found in some other volumes.

Perfect for those new to Shelley as well as long-time devotees.

Shelley is the wild child of English poetry and his determined opposition to tyranny produced a huge variety of poetry, ranging from the rending lament of Keats in Adonais, to the defiant and taut sonnet Ozymandias. His single greatest work, however, is Prometheus Unbound, which a vast gothic ruin of neat poetry. One shot of it and you'll wonder why a) all the nice, obvious prosy bits seem to have been left out and b) why exactly you love it, and him, so much. Like a cross between a vision of God and a lobotomy.

It's strange, but he means it and the grand sweep of the poem and its rebirth of humanity (I did say this isn't kitchen sink drama) is as distinctive an experience as reading Milton for the first time or the first time you read a love letter in the bath. Holding an electric fire.

There are many other poems which should be headline news, such as Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, Mont Blanc, Mutability and Ode to the West Wind, but this edition also has the advantage of including the Defence of Poetry which is the most rhapsodic and emotive arguments you'll ever have the pleasure to be swept away by. For a second you want to believe the beautiful nonsense that 'poets are the unackowledged legislators of the world'. Shelley pulls no punches in prose because he hasn't pulled any in poetry. He believes in the prophetic importance of his role and is electric enough to almost make us belive him.

This is the best student edition of Shelley's works in print. Not according to me, but to a Professor in Romantic Poetry at Oxford University. Not a bad recommendation!

The essays in this volume are generally helpful and explain the structures of the poems where useful. They are also refreshingly short. Shelley is a poet who has run close to obscurity due to reams of bad criticism (by figures as famous as Matthew Arnold and FR Leavis) who have mistaken his extraordinary originality for weakness. An easy mistake, I'm sure. Shelley's poetry is all in the mind, and the lack of concreteness can be frustrating. A bit like flying can be so much more tiresome than walking.

Shelley is a figure of fire; whenever I read any of his works I sense a tremendous energy and vitality, and a great love of life in all its forms.

Shelley lived by the ideals he set out in his poetry and also his radical politics; complete freedom and the embracement of individual choice, and the rejection of all forms of authority which strangled creativity and the human spirit. At the level of his art, this led to Shelley becoming one of the finest poets of the Romantic era and of the English language for all time, but unfortunately in his personal life and his financial situations, disaster.

Always a restless spirit, Shelley was always on the move; he composed some of his finest poems while he lived for a time in Italy. His work covers a wide range from political pamphlets and criticism (such as his essay 'A defence of poetry') to plays and poems of various types and lengths. His most brilliant poems include an Ode to Keats, 'Prometheus Unbound', and 'Queen Mab', a scathing attack on conventional religious values and political tyranny.

One of Shelley's most attractive aspects is his deep love for and sensitivity to the beauty of nature. Shelley was well read in natural sciences and Astronomy and many of his finest poems (including one addressed to a thunderstorm) capture in vivid colour and detail the changes and endless activity of nature.

Unfortunately Shelley died at the tragically young age of 29 in a boating accident related to a storm, caused to a large degree by his own foolhardy nature. But perhaps there was no more fitting an end to such a fiery, unstable and poetically creative man as him.

This edition contains a good sample of his works as well as several critical essays on Shelley and his work.

This text is a great one, as are all of the Norton anthologies that I have bought over the years. The works it contains are as follows:

Poetry:
"Queen Mab"
"Alastor"
"Stanzas -- April, 1814"
"Mutability"
"To Wordsworth"
"Hymn to Intellectual Beauty"
"Mont Blanc"
Excerpts from "Laon and Cynthia"
"To Constantia"
"Ozymandias"
"Lines written among the Euganean Hills"
"Julian and Maddalo"
"Stanza written in Dejection"
"The Two Spirits -- an Allegory"
"The Cenci"
"Prometheus Unbound"
"The Sensitive-Plant"
"Ode to Heaven"
"Ode to the West Wind"
"The Cloud"
"To a Sky-Lark"
"Ode to Liberty"
"The Mask of Anarchy"
"England in 1819"
"Sonnet: To the Republic of Benevento"
"Sonnet ('Lift not the painted veil')"
"Sonnet ('Ye hasten to the grave!')"
"Letter to Maria Gisborne"
"Peter Bell the Third"
"The Witch of Atlas"
"Song of Apollo"
"Song of Pan"
"Epipsychidion"
"Adonais"
"Hellas"
"Written on Hearing the News of the Death of Napoleon"
"The Indian Girl's Song"
"Song ('Rarely, rarely comest thou')"
"The Flower that Smiles Today"
"Memory"
"To ------ ('Music, when soft voices die')"
"When Passion's Trance Is Overpast"
"To Jane. The Invitation"
"To Jane. The Recollection"
"One Word Is Too Often Profaned"
"The Serpent Is Shut Out from Paradise Lost"
"With a Guitar. To Jane."
"To Jane ('The keen stars were twinkling')"
"Lines written in the Bay of Lerici
"The Triumph of Life"

Prose:
"On Love"
"On Life"
"A Defence of Poetry"

As per Norton tradition, most of the major works and some of the lesser ones have an introduction before them in which historical context is given, major themes explained, and important images or ideas are revealed. This collection also contains twenty-two critical essays by scholars such as Harold Bloom, Michael O'Neill, and Susan J. Wolfson, on Shelley and his life and art, including eleven work-specific critical essays.
What a great collection!

"Life like a dome of many colored glass stains the white radiance of eternity"

"If winter comes, can spring be far behind."

"My name is Oxymandias ,king of kings
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains.Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

This excellent collection contains many of the most well- known of Shelley's poems, including 'Ode to the West Wind' 'Oxymandias' ' The Cloud' 'Adonais' ' To a Skylark" "Written in Dejection, Near Naples" "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" "Sonnet" England in 1819"

It contains some of the intensely musical and visionary verse of one of the most wild and revolutionary English Romantics. Shelley never gripped my mind and heart as Wordworth has , but the undeniable beauty of some of his powerful lines sings in my mind ( and I believe will sing in the mind of most readers) to this day.

"O Wild West Wind ,thou Breath of Autumn's Being
Thou, from unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeting "

Shelley is one of the greatest English-language poets the world has ever known. Contained in this Dover edition are some of the finest examples of his work: Ozymandias; his two poetic elegies, Lines Written among the Euganean Hills and Adonais; and his depiction of his relationship with Byron, Julian and Maddalo. These poems, and the others in this edition, offer an excellent introduction to Percy Shelley, and thus to Romanticism as a whole. This is the best dollar that you will ever spend.

This inexpensive Dover edition, Selected Poems - Percy Bysshe Shelley, offers a good introduction to Shelley's wide ranging poetry. These thirty-seven poems, arranged chronologically from 1814-1822, span about 125 pages. The large font makes for easy reading. No footnotes are provided.

I have read this Dover edition several times in the last several years as well as two other short selections of Shelley's poetry. Despite my growing familiarity with his poems, I still find Shelley to be decidedly more challenging than Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge, or Byron.

This increased difficulty is especially evident in Shelley's longer poems. Like me, many readers are likely to become initially disoriented and confused by Shelley's layered and embedded metaphors. Fortunately, with a bit of persistence, careful attention, and multiple readings, most readers will become proficient in unraveling, and appreciating, Shelley's intricate patterns of connected imagery.

This Dover edition includes six of these longer, more challenging poems (even the titles are lengthy): Lines Written among the Euganean Hills (1818), Julian and Maddalo: A Conversation (1818), The Mask of Anarchy - Written on the Occasion of the Massacre at Manchester (1819), Letter to Maria Gisborne (1820), Epipsychidion (1821) - Verses Addressed to the Noble and Unfortunate Lady, Emilia Viviani Imprisoned in the Convent of -----, and Adonais - An Elegy on the Death of John Keats, Author of Endymion, Hyperion, etc.

The remaining thirty-one poems range from a dozen lines to a couple pages. I suggest that the reader new to Shelley focus on shorter poems, reserving the longer excursions for later. The four poems Ozymandias, The Cloud, Ode to the West Wind, and To Night make a good starting point.

This is a wonderful collection of Shelley's greatest poems. I checked it out of the library and was tempted never to return it.

As a Shelley lover I've read numerous biographies, but this will be the last one as no amount of research or writing talent can improve on this book. Richard Holmes clearly did an enormous amount of research and his attention to detail is extraordinary. His love for his subject comes through strongly yet he remains objective throughout and is not blind to Shelley's flaws. His descriptive writing also paints a fascinating picture of the interesting and tough times during which Shelley lived and his wonderful vocabulary had me reaching for my dictionary many times!. He pays as much attention to the other colourful characters in Shelley's life as he does to the poet himself. His analysis of Shelley's complex psyche is intense and I believe his perceptions are very accurate. This book impressed and excited me more than any biography I have ever read.

How is it possible that the world's largest online bookstore doesn't stock any biography of Shelley? He was, after all, not just a poet, but a fascinating character even without taking his literary accomplishments into account. I found Mr. Holmes's great biography in an Oxford, UK bookstore. And I must say it's amazing. I can't believe it was written by a 28-year-old. The research done here is nothing short of astounding. I must say, however, that the long pages devoted to Shelley's political creed and activities can get a bit wearisome - at least for me, who was more interested in the personal and literary aspects of his life, than in the political ones - but then, I understand that this reflects my personal preferences, and admit it doesn't much deter from the book's qualities. In fact, you could say it makes it more solid and thorough, in including a part of Shelley's life that has been traditionally neglected by his biographers.

A nice feature of Mr. Holmes's work is the description of the physical places in Shelley's life - for instance, the house where he was born and the ones which he inhabited during his years in Italy. All of these had some endearing and fascinating trait, from the rolling lawns of Field Place to the sun-soaked terrace of the Casa Magni. I only wish these descriptions had been more in-depth, since it is obvious that Shelley often built strong emotional connections with the places where he lived. I look forward to reading "Footsteps", which is the account of Holmes's literary travels and research, and which is already awaiting me in my bookshelf!

It's probably time for a new Shelley biography, despite Holmes' excellent work. I couldn't recommend this book without a number of caveats.

It was valuable in its time, for countering that Victorian view of the angelic depoliticised and emasculated Shelley. But it's still a document of its time.

There are two things that were wrong with the book even at the time it was written. One is the constant failure to mention instances of Shelley's extraordinary generosity and kindness to others. Maybe it was boring, to a 1970s writer, to mention the old women carried in out of the cold, the children fed, the money given away to strangers in hard times: but to leave most of it out badly distorts the reality of Shelley. He was no saint, but he was a remarkably kind person, and practical with it, and that central and salient characteristic is glossed over, though "gloss" is not quite the word. White's earlier biography is actually more comprehensive on this sort of thing.

The second issue is a grotesque mis-reading of the "Adelaide Shelley" affair, in which Shelley put his name down as the father of an Italian baby. Holmes invents from whole cloth an incident in which Shelley seduced the maid, turning her out of the house when she became pregnant. This is simply bizarre, as Holmes himself later acknowledged. In his next book, "Footsteps", Holmes concedes that not only was there no evidence in favour of this claim, but that it would have been completely out of character for all three of the key figures (Shelley, Claire Clairemont and the maid whose name, from memory, is something like Paola Foggi) who would have had to have been involved in Holmes' scenario.

The story, acknowledged by Holmes to be false, did Shelley's reputation enormous harm (Paul Johnson siezed on it, and added inaccuracies of his own, for his attack on Shelley in the ludicrous "Intellectuals" book; Johnson's Shelley chapter is virtually a cut and paste job from Holmes).

So this has always frustrated me: Why on earth hasn't Holmes corrected it in a later edition? I suspect that Holmes feels that it is a form of integrity, of trueness to himself as a young man, or something, to leave the book in its current form. But since the book is supposed to be a record about Shelley, not Holmes, I'd rather he made this and other corrections.

As well as that, there's new information about the circumstances of Shelley's break with his family, and about his life in Italy, which Holmes doesn't include, because they are based on documents that have only recently come to light or been studied.

So while this was a landmark in its time, it is from this distance not as good as some earlier biographies, and it is due for replacement. If I were to recommend a biographical work to someone with a strong interest in Shelley, I'd recommend his Letters.

Laon (no relation)

After reading Miranda Seymour's biography of Mary Shelley I looked around for an account of P. B. Shelley and found this excellent biography of the poet. The whole generation and family from Mary Wollstonecraft onwards makes a dynastic epic, and a good history of the social politics of a radical generation living through the Restoration. There the ethereal Shelley myth is corrected by a portrait of a radical who had the courage and will to attempt to extract himself form his aristocratic family and class to pursue a radical dream in the unforgiving world of the reactionary wake of the French Revolution. Literary portraits of Shelley still suffer the fate of the poet's work after his death when his reputation was crippled by the conservative age against he revolted. It reminds one of the fate of the Sixties in the minds of the (current) powers that be. It is significant, and mostly forgotten, that the early Queen Mab that so shocked the establishments of the times passed into the bloodstream of the left via the radical underground press, thence to influence the early labor movements and Chartists. Meanwhile the image of Shelley was sanctified by several packs of lies as the quality of genius forced its way into anthological immortality.

I love this CD set! Michael Sheen knows how to read a poem. I play this CD constantly and love it dearly!

I can hardly contain my enthusiasm at finding this title. The poets they chose for this collection couldn't have been more satisfying. The other reason I got it was that I had just discovered actor, Michael Sheen, who narrates. He has a truly, magnificent voice that gives me chills. As someone who has directed voice talent, and devours poetry, I can tell you that he is a very skilled reader. This title is good for people who are poetry snobs as well as people who haven't given classic poetry a real chance. Unfortunately, it is out-of-print, so I had to go through the arduous task of downloading it. This means that it comes without ANY information. I found that very frustrating. I wish that Naxos would re-release it and give Michael Sheen a fat contract to narrate at least 5 more of these!

If you're interested in the life of Edward John Trelawny, you'll have to look elsewhere. Suffice it to say that Tre' (as his friends knew him) was a privateer, a scoundrel, a lover of poetry, a freedom-fighter and a loyal friend of the most prolific literary talents of the romantic period. 'The Last Days of Shelley and Byron' is an account, not of Trelawny's extraordinary life & adventures, but of the two men that helped make that life so extraordinary. In his own words, he tells of the secret lives of Byron, Claire Clairmont and the Shelley's, their romp through sunny Italy and the tragic death of Percy off the coast of Spezzia. The tale continues as Tre' follows Byron to the civil wars of Greece, where Byron too dies. To his credit, though, it is never "Trlawny's tale", but "Byron and Shelley's tale" as told by Trelawny. It is a deep, insightful book that shows the poets as only a close friend could. Yet throughout, one can not help but love Trelawny himself: the man who supported the impoverished Mary Shelley to her dying day... the man who bought a slave for $10,000 only to set him free... the man who reached into the embers of Shelly's pyre, withdrawing his heart. If you love the poetry of Byron and Shelley & have even a passing interest in the men behind the legends, then Trelawny's memoirs are a must-read.

It has been a favorite pastime of academic biographers of both Shelley and Byron to deride Trelawny. This should suprise nobody. To begin with, with few exceptions, one of the primary qualifications of being a full-fledged academic is delight in derision, especially in derision of those who have firsthand knowledge of the subjects they have spent hours in the stacks on University libraries to gain, perhaps, one mote of additional information.-The common criticism of Trelawny is that he was "naive"-By this they mean that his gives a simple, straightforward account of the time he spent with the two great poets without any ponderous theories to bog him down.-Trelawny first admired Byron, but quickly became disillusioned with his cynicism and became a lifelong admirer of Shelley, so much so that he remarked thus, "As a general rule,threfore, it is wise to avoid writers whose works amuse or delight you, for when you see them they will delight you no more. Shelley was a grand exception to this rule. To form a just idea of his poetry, you should have witnessed his daily life; his words and actions best illustrated his writings." After Shelley's death, he continues to follow Byron on his misadventures until his death. The book is a treat in that it is a delight to read, with page-turning accounts of his roistering times with two great men who shaped our literary world.-Not one footnote! He was there!

The lives and deaths of Shelley and Byron ought to interest the world--not just the readers of English--for their poetry covered every topic: the rise and fall of empires, nation-building and nation-breaking, and the vanity of the men who would lead them in victory or defeat. And Edward John Trelawny shows us each poet as a human being. The production of fine writing should not be a mystery; beautiful language comes most eloquently from a troubled heart and a mind committed to seeking knowledge. Trelawny reminds us that Byron's and Shelley's lives were focused on connecting to people through their work; Tre begins each chapter with lines from the work of Byron or Shelley.

The Introduction to this edition of Trelawny's book is written by Anne Barton, a professor at Trinity College, Cambridge University, from which Byron himself graduated about 200 years ago. I disagree with her that Tre's writing is "focused for the most part upon himself" as though he were self-centered, though Barton does say he had "hidden depths" (xx). Based on the form and structure and content of Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author (and Tre's subsequent life), it seems that Trelawny was aware of the nuances of human character and was more than adequate to the task of knowing complex people. The details he provides in key places are so specific that they could not have been lies or fabrications; Byron's claim that Trelawny could not tell the truth was simply evidence of Byron's pleasure in teasing banter. "Byron's idle talk during the exhumation of [Edward Elliker] William's remains," Trelawny writes, "did not proceed from want of feeling, but from his anxiety to conceal what he felt from others" (146). Byron also concealed his feelings at the cremation of Shelley's remains. It's clear throughout the book that Tre is a sharp observer--of himself and others. And Tre was sensitive to what Mary Godwin Shelley and Williams' wife, Jane, felt about the drowning of their husbands in the Bay of Spezia. Mary Shelley wrote to Tre that she experienced a "blank moral death" (176). Tre shows that the breakup of the Pisan Circle--because of Shelley's drowning--was clearly a personal tragedy with far-reaching consequences.

This is a book for all seasons--but better appreciated while strolling on a beach in some far-flung corner of a poetic universe.

If you're interested in the life of Edward John Trelawny, you'll have to look elsewhere. Suffice it to say that Tre' (as his friends knew him) was a privateer, a scoundrel, a lover of poetry, a freedom-fighter and a loyal friend of the most prolific literary talents of the romantic period. "Records of Shelley, Byron and the Author" is an account, not of Trelawny's extraordinary life & adventures, but of the two men that helped make that life so extraordinary. In his own words, he tells of the secret lives of Byron and the Shelley's, their romp through sunny Italy and the tragic death of Percy in the coast of Spezzia. The tale continues as Tre' follows Byron to the bloody civil war in Greece, where Byron too dies. To his credit, though, it is never "Trelawny's tale", but "Byron and Shelley's tale" as told by Trelawny. This deep, insightful book shows the poets as only a close friend could. Yet throughout, one can not help but love Trelawny himself: the man who supported the impoverished Mary Shelley to her dying day... the man who bought a slave for $10,000 only to set him free... the man who reached into the embers of Shelley's pyre, withdrawing his heart. If you love the poetry of Byron and Shelley & have even a passing interest in the men behind the legends, then Trelawny's memoirs are a must-read.

Coombs provides an informative and inspiring insight into not only the works of Keats and Shelley but also the Romantic movement as a whole. She strikes a good balance between history, the lives of the authors and a study their works, both major and minor, which serves as a starter for the relatively novice student and as desert for the better nourished reader. This is a must have for any student of the Romantic genre, and it is a great pity that this book is no longer in print.

I love vampire literature and movies, and there is quite a lot in that subgenre, but much of it is bad. And I love poetry. And i love literature and literary theory. But to be honest, I didn't expect much out of Paul Lake's novel. It calls itself a _literary_ vampire mystery, which is a bit pretentious (and Lake is known as a critic an poet, not a fiction writer). I thought anything that bills itself as a literary vampire story...well, let's just say I didn't expect much out of it. And pleasantly, I was surprised (though I shouldn't have been, Lake writes well-done and interesting essays, and he has a knack for the narrative poem, so I know he can tell a good story). It's a well written story with believable characters (half the fun is guessing who the characters are in real life--and believe me, you can recognize many of the poets within) and a well thought out plot. It even has a nice twisted surprise ending. The only gripe I have is that Lake spends too much time complaining about the state of contemporary poetry and how our poets are 'treated' (sometimes I got the impression that he only wrote the novel so he could complain about what all poets already know..and already comlain about). Other than that you get an interesting story that blends poetry, criticism, literary history, and vampires into a great novel (had one of the big publishing companies released this book instead of Story Line Press, more people might be familiar with the book, but unfortunately Story Line, great press that it is, has never had the money to set forth much of an advertising or publicity campaign).

This book contains three things. Shelley's translation of Plato's dialogue _The Banquet_ (or _Symposium_), the first and still the greatest English version; Shelley's courageously anti-homophobic essay _A Discourse on the Manners of the Ancient Athenians Relative to the Subject of Love_; and an introduction by editor John Lauritsen. The five stars are for Shelley.

The _Symposium_ presents a group of Athenian aristocrats who share privilege, contempt for democracy and the leisure needed for philosophy. After one banquet, the slaves gone, they compete to make the best speech in praise of love. The most memorable speeches are by Aristophanes, Socrates and Alcibiades.

Aristophanes creates a comic myth in which men and women were once joined, sharing a body and a soul (and, each androgynous creature having four legs and four arms, getting about by tumbling). The gods became jealous of these creatures' happiness and split them up, creating the two sexes we know today. But men and women stayed together, each with the partner with whom they had shared a soul. So Zeus scattered them, forcing the male and female soulmates apart. And still men and women search amongst each other, looking for that one perfect soulmate.

Socrates' speech concerns love between men and boys, arguing that in their highest forms these loves have no sexual element. Alcibiades arrives late and drunk, and refuses to speak in praise of anything but Socrates himself. The party then breaks up.

The _Symposium_ is Plato's most theatrical dialogue, with vivid characterisation, deft comic touches and soaring poetic language. Shelley was also fascinated by Alcibiades' anecdote about Socrates standing lost in thought, oblivious to sun, cold, thirst or pain, motionless for three days. Shelley's translation is literally accurate (despite some minor errors) but also accurate in the higher sense of being a brilliantly poetic rendering of a brilliantly poetic work. Shelley called Plato's original "radiant", lamenting that his own words were a "gray veil" over the brightness of the original. But his modesty was unwarranted: his is one of the great English prose translations: fresh, clear and indeed radiant.

Shelley's _Ancient Athenians_ essay is just as remarkable. It attempts to explain how [some] ancient Athenians could have thought love between men, including sexual love, was "higher" than heterosexual love. In doing so he presented a pioneering case against homophobia. The courage of Shelley's stance in his 1818 essay, as in so many things, is simply astonishing.

Shelley's argument was that homosexuality flourished in
ancient Athens, and was considered nobler than heterosexual relations, because of the suppression of women. Athenian society didn't educate girls or women, and excluded them from the city's intellectual, artistic and political life. Therefore, Shelley argued, it was harder for male-female relationships to be equal partnerships, or to include the life of the mind, or indeed much beyond the housekeeping mundane or the purely sexual. Though he argued against condemning homosexuality he was also, as a proto-feminist, arguing that the social conditions that (he thought) foster homosexuality are unjust and undesirable.

Lauritsen's introduction misreads both texts in claiming them as gay classics. Plato's text has Socrates promote intergenerational same-sex relationships, though ideally without sexual practice or the body. Alcibiades' speech is homoerotic in its praise of Socrates, but crucial to that praise is that Socrates is celibate, even when tempted by the beautiful Alcibiades himself. Later, Plato will withdraw this limited tolerance, banning homosexuals from his "ideal" republic. As Karl Popper observed, Plato was a sign on the road that led to Fascism, Nazism, Communism. The _Symposium_ is a treasure of world literature, but too problematic a text simply to be celebrated as a gay classic.

Shelley's essay is also classic but not "gay". (Setting aside the fact that "gay" places someone within a culture that didn't exist in Shelley's lifetime.) Shelley argued that homosexual relationships can be loving and noble, and should not be condemned unless there is brutality or other things that would be equally undesirable in a heterosexual relationship. But he argues as a sympathetic outsider (with bisexual male friends), who also wrote essays defending the political rights of Ireland, deists and Catholics, without being Irish, or a deist or Catholic.

Lauritsen arguments for claiming Shelley as "gay" are astonishingly shonky. One, amazingly, is that Shelley was good-looking. But ... what about good-looking heterosexuals? Or Shelley's facial boils? More Lauritsen "evidence" is that Shelley stood naked when Trelawney first met him. But in public school culture then as now it was "manly"; not to fuss about being naked in front of other men; also, Shelley had been bathing, and he'd expected to pass women on the beach but didn't know Trelawney was there. Lauritsen mentions missing diary pages to suggest a cover-up. But he should know that the diary in question is Claire Claremont's and surrounding evidence indicates that the missing pages concern a pregnancy, an entirely heterosexual scandal. And Lauritsen says, meaningfully, that Shelley kissed friends at school, but should surely know that in that less emotionally constrained age men kissed to indicate friendship, not trouser turbulence. And so on.

Instead, Shelley was something more radical. Fascinated by androgyny, he asserted the right to enact masculinity as it suited him; ridin', shootin' and boatin' with Byron and Trelawney, and gentle and "womanly" with women and some male friends. Shelley unhitched the link, as Lauritsen does not, between gender performance and sexual orientation, in that sense being an ancestor of more fluid current thinking on sexuality. The idea that a man who is prepared to drop the male "armour" is necessarily homosexual is a 19th century conservative idea: it's ironic that some gay activists later took it up.

But despite reservations on Lauritsen's claims, he deserves our thanks for making Shelley's two magnificent tests available again. Shelley might be bemused to find himself claimed as gay, but he'd be pleased to find his works still enlisted in the struggle against bigotry and in the cause of love.

Cheers!

Laon