Shelley

An account by John Addington Symonds, well known as an author, poet and critic, of Shelley's short and controversial career.

John Addington Symonds (Author)

9781108034692, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 3 November 2011

202 pages
21.6 x 14 x 1.2 cm, 0.26 kg

John Addington Symonds (1840–93), well known as an author, poet and critic, wrote this biography of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) in an attempt to portray the complete man. Shelley, Symonds writes, was more than a controversial atheist. He was full of earnest conviction, enthusiasm, and intellectual vigour, but also extravagance, crudity and presumption. Published in 1878 in the first series of English Men of Letters, this book thus provides an account of a literary life famously cut short, describing a writer whose intellectual and poetic legacy was perhaps not fully appreciated in the Victorian period, when the response to his poems was frequently coloured by antipathy to his revolutionary ideas and his unconventional private life, as well as to his loudly proclaimed atheism.

1. Birth and childhood
2. Eton and Oxford
3. Life in London and first marriage
4. Second residence in London, and separation from Harriet
5. Life at Marlow, and journey to Italy
6. Residence at Pisa
7. Last days
8. Epilogue.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]