Shelley: The Pursuit (New York Review Books Classics) - Softcover

Holmes, Richard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1590170377 ISBN 13: 9781590170373

Publisher: New York Review of Books, 2003

Synopsis

Shelley: The Pursuit is the book with which Richard Holmes--the finest literary biographer of our day--made his name. Dispensing with the long-established Victorian picture of Shelley as a blandly ethereal character, Holmes projects a startling image of "a darker and more earthly, crueler and more capable figure." Expelled from college, disowned by his aristocratic father, driven from England, Shelley led a life marked from its beginning to its early end by a violent rejection of society; he embraced rebellion and disgrace without thought of the cost to himself or to others. Here we have the real Shelley--radical agitator, atheist, apostle of free love, but above all a brilliant and uncompromising poetic innovator, whose life and work have proved an essential inspiration to poets as varied as W.B. Yeats and Allen Ginsberg.

About this title

Review:

"Shelley: The Pursuit achieves a superlative in biography: its subject's presence -- that of a disturbing, seductive, gifted, destructive man whose essence is mutiny. ... Holmes makes us feel the combination of originality, intensity, and dependency that made the poet so beguiling."

From the Back Cover:

Shelley, the most neglected of all the great Romantic poets, was born in Sussex in 1792 and died in Tuscany in 1822, a brief life packed with love affairs, alarums and excursions. Holmes's book offers a serious and critical reappraisal of Shelly as a man and a writer: all his prose and poetry is carefully re-examined, his sense of spiritual and geographical isolation brilliantly described and a detailed portrait of his macabre imaginative life slowly assembled. Shelley's intense friendships with some of the most remarkable figures of his age fill Holmes's pages with a vivid panorama of revolutionary idealism and recklessness. To this is added the private story of Shelley's torturous romantic liaisons, complications which affected both the peculiar tenor of his daily life and the remotest conceptions of his poetry.

“If the art of biography was ever damned, 'Shelley: The Pursuit' redeems it”
NEW YORK TIMES

“The best biography of Shelley ever written... The great emphasis that Mr Holmes lays on Shelley's politics, philosophy and social activities corrects the usual view of an extraordinarily idealized, ethereal, spiritualized kind of poetry combined with an extraordinarily incoherent life... He has taken the Shelley story out of the realm of myth and made it far more convincing and significant.”
SIR STEPHEN SPENDER

“Richard Holmes's towering biography... was the first book I read about Shelley, and it led me to perhaps fifty others, none of which came within a million mile of Richard Holmes's"
PAUL FOOT, in his book 'Red Shelley'

About this edition

• Publisher: New York Review of Books
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1590170377
• ISBN 13: 9781590170373
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 880