| Summary: |
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) wrote two of the best known shorter poems in English, 'Ode to the West Wind' and 'Ozymandias'; a series of ambitious and challenging long poems including "Queen Mab" and the 'Lyrical Drama' P"rometheus Unbound"; "A Defence of Poetry" and other lucid and provocative political and literary works in prose; sonnets, satires, translations, travel-letters. During and after his lifetime controversy was generated by his poetry, radical politics, atheism, vegetarianism and unorthodox relationships. He was the young Robert Browning's 'Sun-Treader' and Matthew Arnold's 'ineffectual angel'; W.B. Yeats said that Shelley 'shaped my life' and F.R. Leavis discouraged people from reading him. The dictionary covers all these areas of interest, as well as Shelley's travels and homes in Britain and Europe, his important personal and literary relationships with Mary Shelley, Byron, Godwin, Keats, Peacock, Coleridge, Wordsworth, his vast reading, European and American reception, representations in fiction, drama, film and portraits, and the sources, publication history, reviews and illustrations of his work. |