Percy Bysshe Shelley

His tragic early death by drowning in 1822, at the age of twenty-nine, cut short the life-work of the poet whom Matthew Arnold called a "beautiful and ineffectual angel." Still, Percy Bysshe Shelley endures today as the great Promethean bard of the High Romantic period who is best remembered for extolling the sublime and affirming the possibility of transcendence. This Modern Library edition contains all of Shelley's magnificent poetry: the political epics Queen Mab and The Revolt of Islam, along with the shorter poem The Mask of Anarchy; his hymns, odes, and verse epistles; "Adonais," a classical elegy on the death of Keats; Julian and Maddalo, a poetic treatment of his friendship with Byron; and the five-act verse tragedy The Cenci. Included as well are Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude; Epipsychidion, perhaps the most outspoken and eloquent appeal for free love in the language; the satiric Peter Bell the Third; and the great unfinished poem The Triumph of Life. Presented too is Shelley's visionary masterpiece Prometheus Unbound, the grand lyrical drama often compared with Dante's Paradiso. "If any one who has read [Prometheus Unbound] still supposes that ... Shelley is any other than a very great poet, I cannot help him," said C. S. Lewis. With an introduction and notes by the poet's widow, Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. - Jacket flap.

Shelley's love poem is illuminated by paintings from the Edwardian and Victorian eras.