Shelley: The Pursuit

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.

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Published: 05/31/2003
ISBN: 9781590170373
Pages: 880
Weight: 2.55lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.00w x 2.00d

Review Citations: Library Journal 07/01/2004 pg. 130
Commonweal 12/07/2007 pg. 28