Shelley: Poems (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets)

My rating:

add to my books

Shelley: Poems (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets)

by Percy Bysshe Shelley

3.96 · rating details · 49 ratings · 4 reviews

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), perhaps the most intellectually adventurous of the great Romantic poets, personified the richly various- and contradictory- energies of his time. A classicist, a headlong visionary, a social radical, and a poet of serene artistry with a lyric touch second to none, Shelley gave voice to English romanticism's deepest aspirations.

Hardcover, 256 pages

Published November 2nd 1993 by Everyman's Library (first published June 1968)

more details... edit details

Get a copy:

More…

There is a good chance some of your friends read this book. Sign in to see!

Friend Reviews

To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.

Lists with This Book

This book is currently not featured on any Listopia lists. Add this book to your favorite list »

Community Reviews

(showing 1-30 of 84)

filter | sort: default (?) | rating details

Jun 03, 2010

Rowland Bismark rated it

The central thematic concerns of Shelley’s poetry are largely the same themes that defined Romanticism, especially among the younger English poets of Shelley’s era: beauty, the passions, nature, political liberty, creativity, and the sanctity of the imagination. What makes Shelley’s treatment of these themes unique is his philosophical relationship to his subject matter—which was better developed and articulated than that of any other Romantic poet with the possible exception of Wordsworth—and h...moreThe central thematic concerns of Shelley’s poetry are largely the same themes that defined Romanticism, especially among the younger English poets of Shelley’s era: beauty, the passions, nature, political liberty, creativity, and the sanctity of the imagination. What makes Shelley’s treatment of these themes unique is his philosophical relationship to his subject matter—which was better developed and articulated than that of any other Romantic poet with the possible exception of Wordsworth—and his temperament, which was extraordinarily sensitive and responsive even for a Romantic poet, and which possessed an extraordinary capacity for joy, love, and hope. Shelley fervently believed in the possibility of realizing an ideal of human happiness as based on beauty, and his moments of darkness and despair (he had many, particularly in book-length poems such as the monumental Queen Mab) almost always stem from his disappointment at seeing that ideal sacrificed to human weakness.

Shelley’s intense feelings about beauty and expression are documented in poems such as “Ode to the West Wind” and “To a Skylark,” in which he invokes metaphors from nature to characterize his relationship to his art. The center of his aesthetic philosophy can be found in his important essay A Defence of Poetry, in which he argues that poetry brings about moral good. Poetry, Shelley argues, exercises and expands the imagination, and the imagination is the source of sympathy, compassion, and love, which rest on the ability to project oneself into the position of another person.

No other English poet of the early nineteenth century so emphasized the connection between beauty and goodness, or believed so avidly in the power of art’s sensual pleasures to improve society. Byron’s pose was one of amoral sensuousness, or of controversial rebelliousness; Keats believed in beauty and aesthetics for their own sake. But Shelley was able to believe that poetry makes people and society better; his poetry is suffused with this kind of inspired moral optimism, which he hoped would affect his readers sensuously, spiritually, and morally, all at the same time.

In Shelley’s poetry, the figure of the poet (and, to some extent, the figure of Shelley himself) is not simply a talented entertainer or even a perceptive moralist but a grand, tragic, prophetic hero. The poet has a deep, mystic appreciation for nature, as in the poem “To Wordsworth” (1816), and this intense connection with the natural world gives him access to profound cosmic truths, as in “Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude” (1816). He has the power—and the duty—to translate these truths, through the use of his imagination, into poetry, but only a kind of poetry that the public can understand. Thus, his poetry becomes a kind of prophecy, and through his words, a poet has the ability to change the world for the better and to bring about political, social, and spiritual change. Shelley’s poet is a near-divine savior, comparable to Prometheus, who stole divine fire and gave it to humans in Greek mythology, and to Christ. Like Prometheus and Christ, figures of the poets in Shelley’s work are often doomed to suffer: because their visionary power isolates them from other men, because they are misunderstood by critics, because they are persecuted by a tyrannical government, or because they are suffocated by conventional religion and middle-class values. In the end, however, the poet triumphs because his art is immortal, outlasting the tyranny of government, religion, and society and living on to inspire new generations.

Like many of the romantic poets, especially William Wordsworth, Shelley demonstrates a great reverence for the beauty of nature, and he feels closely connected to nature’s power. In his early poetry, Shelley shares the romantic interest in pantheism—the belief that God, or a divine, unifying spirit, runs through everything in the universe. He refers to this unifying natural force in many poems, describing it as the “spirit of beauty” in “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” and identifying it with Mont Blanc and the Arve River in “Mont Blanc.” This force is the cause of all human joy, faith, goodness, and pleasure, and it is also the source of poetic inspiration and divine truth. Shelley asserts several times that this force can influence people to change the world for the better. However, Shelley simultaneously recognizes that nature’s power is not wholly positive. Nature destroys as often as it inspires or creates, and it destroys cruelly and indiscriminately. For this reason, Shelley’s delight in nature is mitigated by an awareness of its dark side.

Shelley uses nature as his primary source of poetic inspiration. In such poems as “The Mask of Anarchy Written on the Occasion of the Massacre at Manchester” (1819) and “Ode to the West Wind,” Shelley suggests that the natural world holds a sublime power over his imagination. This power seems to come from a stranger, more mystical place than simply his appreciation for nature’s beauty or grandeur. At the same time, although nature has creative power over Shelley because it provides inspiration, he feels that his imagination has creative power over nature. It is the imagination—or our ability to form sensory perceptions—that allows us to describe nature in different, original ways, which help to shape how nature appears and, therefore, how it exists. Thus, the power of the human mind becomes equal to the power of nature, and the experience of beauty in the natural world becomes a kind of collaboration between the perceiver and the perceived. Because Shelley cannot be sure that the sublime powers he senses in nature are only the result of his gifted imagination, he finds it difficult to attribute nature’s power to God: the human role in shaping nature damages Shelley’s ability to believe that nature’s beauty comes solely from a divine source.

This sonnet from 1817 is probably Shelley’s most famous and most anthologized poem—which is somewhat strange, considering that it is in many ways an atypical poem for Shelley, and that it touches little upon the most important themes in his oeuvre at large (beauty, expression, love, imagination). Still, “Ozymandias” is a masterful sonnet. Essentially it is devoted to a single metaphor: the shattered, ruined statue in the desert wasteland, with its arrogant, passionate face and monomaniacal inscription (“Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”). The once-great king’s proud boast has been ironically disproved; Ozymandias’s works have crumbled and disappeared, his civilization is gone, all has been turned to dust by the impersonal, indiscriminate, destructive power of history. The ruined statue is now merely a monument to one man’s hubris, and a powerful statement about the insignificance of human beings to the passage of time. Ozymandias is first and foremost a metaphor for the ephemeral nature of political power, and in that sense the poem is Shelley’s most outstanding political sonnet, trading the specific rage of a poem like “England in 1819” for the crushing impersonal metaphor of the statue. But Ozymandias symbolizes not only political power—the statue can be a metaphor for the pride and hubris of all of humanity, in any of its manifestations. It is significant that all that remains of Ozymandias is a work of art and a group of words; as Shakespeare does in the sonnets, Shelley demonstrates that art and language long outlast the other legacies of power.

Of course, it is Shelley’s brilliant poetic rendering of the story, and not the subject of the story itself, which makes the poem so memorable. Framing the sonnet as a story told to the speaker by “a traveller from an antique land” enables Shelley to add another level of obscurity to Ozymandias’s position with regard to the reader—rather than seeing the statue with our own eyes, so to speak, we hear about it from someone who heard about it from someone who has seen it. Thus the ancient king is rendered even less commanding; the distancing of the narrative serves to undermine his power over us just as completely as has the passage of time. Shelley’s description of the statue works to reconstruct, gradually, the figure of the “king of kings”: first we see merely the “shattered visage,” then the face itself, with its “frown / And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command”; then we are introduced to the figure of the sculptor, and are able to imagine the living man sculpting the living king, whose face wore the expression of the passions now inferable; then we are introduced to the king’s people in the line, “the hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.” The kingdom is now imaginatively complete, and we are introduced to the extraordinary, prideful boast of the king: “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” With that, the poet demolishes our imaginary picture of the king, and interposes centuries of ruin between it and us: “ ‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ / Nothing beside remains. Round the decay / Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, / The lone and level sands stretch far away.”(less)

· see review

Dec 25, 2010

Venus added it

Shelves: poem

Death is here and death is there,
Death is busy everywhere,
All around, within, beneath,
Above is death—and we are death.

· see review

Jul 29, 2010

Kathy rated it

My dad bought this book for me in 2000. It is filled with little yellow tabs on all my favourites.

· see review

Dec 23, 2008

Valerie rated it

· review of another edition

Shelves: cypresslibrary

Not the best collection of his poetry I have read. This one can stay at Cypress for the edification of my students.

· see review

Feb 10, 2012

Brad Craft rated it

Jan 31, 2012

Yvonne rated it

Jan 27, 2012

Carol marked it as to-read

Jan 23, 2012

Johnny B3 rated it

Jan 21, 2012

Rodney Ulyate marked it as to-read

Jan 13, 2012

Agnes Williamson rated it

Shelves: classic, literature, poetry, romanticism, percy, bysshe, shelley, poet

Jan 02, 2012

J.W. rated it

Dec 18, 2011

Kleomenes rated it

Dec 09, 2011

A. marked it as to-read

Shelves: poetry, poets

Dec 08, 2011

Ashok Banker rated it

Nov 25, 2011

Cameron Green rated it

Nov 18, 2011

Marion marked it as to-read

Shelves: poetry, romanticism

Oct 16, 2011

Safie Muhammad marked it as to-read

Oct 07, 2011

Jur marked it as to-read

Shelves: everyman-s-library, poetry, wishlist

Sep 25, 2011

S. Morningstar marked it as available-at-library

Shelves: poetry

Sep 23, 2011

Peter rated it

Sep 15, 2011

Lee Brazil rated it

Shelves: poetry

Sep 04, 2011

Nahla rated it

Aug 07, 2011

Giovanna marked it as to-read

Jul 28, 2011

Koroviev rated it

· review of another edition

Jul 28, 2011

Kevin rated it

· review of another edition

Jul 24, 2011

Caroline rated it

Jun 15, 2011

Mikela added it · review of another edition

Jun 12, 2011

Lamia added it

May 30, 2011

Andrew rated it

May 16, 2011

Marc Gelinas rated it

« previous 1 2 3 next »

new topic
Discuss This Book

There are no discussion topics on this book yet. Be the first to start one »

Recommend it | Stats | Recent status updates

combine
Other Editions (5)

More editions...

Genres

Poetry

14 users

See top shelves...

Readers Also Enjoyed

Tennyson: Poems
by Alfred Tennyson
Poems and Prose
by Edgar Allan Poe
Keats: Poems
by John Keats
Poems of Christina Rossetti
by Christina Rossetti
Poems
by Walt Whitman

About Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the major English Romantic poets and is widely considered to be among the finest lyric poets of the English language. He is perhaps most famous for such anthology pieces as Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark, and The Masque of Anarchy. However, his major works were long visionary poems including Alastor, Adonais, The Revolt of Islam, Prometheus Unbound a...more

More about Percy Bysshe Shelley...

Books by Percy Bysshe Shelley

More…

Share This Book

Facebook Twitter Your website

Pin It

Trivia About Shelley: Poems

No trivia or quizzes yet. Add some now »

title link	preview: Shelley: Poems
avg rating	preview: Shelley: Poems Goodreads rating: 3.96 (49 ratings)
small image	preview: click here [close]
med image	preview: click here [close]
BBCode	[url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/573346.Shelley?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book][img]http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1175907021m/573346.jpg[/img][/url] [url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/573346.Shelley?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book]Shelley: Poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley[/url]

Shelley: Poems (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets)

Friend Reviews

Lists with This Book

Community Reviews

new topicDiscuss This Book

combine Other Editions (5)

Genres

Readers Also Enjoyed

About Percy Bysshe Shelley

Books by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Share This Book

Share This Book on Your Website

Trivia About Shelley: Poems

new topic
Discuss This Book

combine
Other Editions (5)