Shelley on Love: Selected writings - Softcover

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0006550126 ISBN 13: 9780006550129

Publisher: Flamingo, 1996

Synopsis

Richard Holmes brings together for the first time Shelley’s almost unknown prose writings as well as the better-known love poetry for which he is famous. The collection, which treats of love in all its forms and manifestations, presents on intellectual and emotional portrait of a great poet’s beliefs and personality.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

In this book Richard Holmes brings together for the first time Shelley's almost unknown prose writings on love as well as the better-known love poetry for which he is famous. He argues that Shelley's conception of love lies at the heart of his radical views on social justice, political liberty, and poetry itself, and presents an intellectual and emotional portrait of a great poet's beliefs and personality developing from adolescent to the threshold of maturity, when, at the age of thirty, they were tragically cut short.

The collection, which is divided biographically into six thematic sections, gives not only a Romantic poet's view of romantic passion, but treats of love in all its forms and manifestations. Shelley's wonderfully graceful version of Plato's 'Symposium' is rescued from obscurity, and three telling extracts from his lesser-read long poems show his attitudes to love at critical points in his life.

The coolness and clarity of Shelley's prose, his powers of argument and of concrete description, and his fierce intellectual honesty are qualities rare in any age. His social, political and philosophical concerns are of the highest interest, and engage the fundamental questions of human relationship in a radically searching and imaginative spirit. As Richard Holmes writes Shelley's prose writings on love 'take us back to the deeper appreciation of his major poetry, and forward to the better comprehension of our own hearts'.

A new selection of Shelley's hauntingly beautiful love lyrics completes this edition.

About the Author:

Richard Holmes is the author of The Age of Wonder, which won the Royal Society Prize for Science Books and the National Book Critics Circle Award and was one of the ten New York Times’ Best Books of the Year in 2009. His balloon book, Falling Upwards, was chosen as a Best Book of the Year by seven newspapers in 2013. His other biographies include Shelley: The Pursuit (winner of the 1974 Somerset Maugham Prize), Coleridge: Early Visions (winner of the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year Award), Coleridge: Darker Reflections (shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize and winner of the Duff Cooper Prize), and Dr. Johnson & Mr. Savage (winner of the 1993 James Tait Black Prize). This Long Pursuit completes the autobiographical trilogy begun in Footsteps (1985) and Sidetracks (2000). Holmes was awarded the OBE in 1992, and was elected an Honorary Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, in 2010. He is the 2018 winner of the BIO Award presented by the Biographers International Organization for sustained achievement in biography. He lives in London and Norwich with the novelist Rose Tremain.

About this edition

• Publisher: Flamingo
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0006550126
• ISBN 13: 9780006550129
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224
• Editor: Richard Holmes