Search results for ""Author Percy Bysshe Shelley""

In the summer of 1818, Percy Bysshe Shelley pulled himself away from a flurry of other projects to devote himself to translating Plato's Symposium. Besides being one of the very great lyric poets of Romanticism, Shelley was an accomplished Hellenist, and had a natural sympathy for Plato's way of seeing the world. The result of his labor was a translation of Plato's principal work on love that is, in both clarity and felicity of expression, unmatched by any contemporary translation. Much of what the dialogue offers to today's reader - namely, its invitation to see erotic experience as the privileged locus of our contact with the sacred and the divine - is lost in translation by failures of tone more than by inaccuracies or simple infelicities. The elevation and sophistication of Shelley's prose makes his translation a much better English vehicle for Plato's writing than the rather chatty and colloquial translations current today. Plato's speeches on love need an English idiom in which myth is at home, and in which humour rises to urbanity rather than descending to mere wit and joke. With Shelley, we get a translation of a great literary masterpiece by a writer who is himself a literary master, and his mastery is of exactly the type required by Plato's text. This translation came at the height of Shelley's powers, mirroring in language and conception some of his finest works, and so is itself a precious document in the history of Romanticism, for which the re-appropriation of Plato is second in importance only to the massive influence of Shakespeare. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, her husband's literary executor, upon publication of (a somewhat expurgated version of) the dialogue, boasted that "Shelley resembled Plato; both taking more delight in the abstract and the ideal than in the special and the tangible. This did not result from imitation; for it was not till Shelley resided in Italy that he made Plato his study. He then translated his Symposium and Ion; and the English language boasts of no more brilliant composition than Plato's Praise of Love translated by Shelley." If this goes too far, it goes at least in the right direction. David K. O'Connor, in his introduction and footnotes, provides the historical and philosophic framework to appreciate best the importance of the dialogue and translation.

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In the summer of 1818, Percy Bysshe Shelley pulled himself away from a flurry of other projects to devote himself to translating Plato's Symposium. Besides being one of the very great lyric poets of Romanticism, Shelley was an accomplished Hellenist, and had a natural sympathy for Plato's way of seeing the world. The result of his labor was a translation of Plato's principal work on love that is, in both clarity and felicity of expression, unmatched by any contemporary translation. Much of what the dialogue offers to today's reader - namely, its invitation to see erotic experience as the privileged locus of our contact with the sacred and the divine - is lost in translation by failures of tone more than by inaccuracies or simple infelicities. The elevation and sophistication of Shelley's prose makes his translation a much better English vehicle for Plato's writing than the rather chatty and colloquial translations current today. Plato's speeches on love need an English idiom in which myth is at home, and in which humour rises to urbanity rather than descending to mere wit and joke. With Shelley, we get a translation of a great literary masterpiece by a writer who is himself a literary master, and his mastery is of exactly the type required by Plato's text. This translation came at the height of Shelley's powers, mirroring in language and conception some of his finest works, and so is itself a precious document in the history of Romanticism, for which the re-appropriation of Plato is second in importance only to the massive influence of Shakespeare. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, her husband's literary executor, upon publication of (a somewhat expurgated version of) the dialogue, boasted that "Shelley resembled Plato; both taking more delight in the abstract and the ideal than in the special and the tangible. This did not result from imitation; for it was not till Shelley resided in Italy that he made Plato his study. He then translated his Symposium and Ion; and the English language boasts of no more brilliant composition than Plato's Praise of Love translated by Shelley." If this goes too far, it goes at least in the right direction. David K. O'Connor, in his introduction and footnotes, provides the historical and philosophic framework to appreciate best the importance of the dialogue and translation.

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During his short and restless life, Percy Bysshe Shelley produced a great number of poems, three verse plays and numerous prose works, as well as many essays in which he propounded his philosophical views and radical political ideas. These, together with his highly unconventional itinerant life and his literary connections, make him one of the most important and intriguing figures in British Romanticism. This volume provides a generous selection of his poetry, from the sonnet ‘Ozymandias’ to famous lyrics such as ‘Ode to the West Wind’ and ‘Lines Written among the Euganean Hills’, to the longer poems of his maturity, Adonais and Epipsychidion, all thoroughly annotated and presented in chronological order.

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In 1810, while still at Eton, Percy Bysshe Shelley published Zastrozzi, the first of his two early Gothic prose romances. He published the second, St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian, a year later. These sensationalist novels present some of Shelley’s earliest thoughts on irresponsible self-indulgence and violent revenge, and offer remarkable insight into an imagination that is strikingly modern. This new Broadview Literary Texts edition also brings together the fragmentary remains of Shelley’s other prose fiction, including his chapbook, Wolfstein, and contemporary reviews both by Shelley and about his work.

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This major new edition, originally commissioned for the acclaimed Oxford Authors series under the general editorship of Frank Kermode, brings together a unique combination of Shelley's poetry and prose - the lyric poems, plays, longer poems, criticism, and essays - to give the essence of his work and thinking. Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was a Romantic poet of radical imaginings, living in an age of change. His tempestuous life and friendship with Byron, and his tragically early death, at times threatened to overwhelm his legacy as a poet, but today his standing as one of the foremost English authors is assured. This freshly edited anthology - the fullest one-volume selection in English - includes all but one of the longer poems, from Queen Mab onwards, in their entirety. Only Laon and Cythna is excerpted, in a generous selection. As well as works such asPrometheus Unbound, The Mask of Anarchy, and Adonais, the volume includes a wide range of Shelley's shorter poems and much of his major prose, including A Defence of Poetry and almost all of A Philosophical View of Reform. Shelley emerges from these pages as a passionate and eloquent opponent of tyranny and a champion of human possibility. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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A major new anthology of Percy Bysshe Shelley's work, edited by Jack Donovan and Cian Duffy.'My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the leading English Romantics and is critically regarded among the finest lyric poets in the English language. His major works include the long visionary poems 'Prometheus Unbound' and 'Adonais', an elegy on the death of John Keats. His shorter, classic verses include 'To a Skylark', 'Mont Blanc' and 'Ode to the West Wind'. This important new edition collects his best poetry and prose, revealing how his writings weave together the political, personal, visionary and idealistic.This Penguin Classics edition includes a fascinating introduction, notes and other materials by leading Shelley scholars, Jack Donovan and Cian Duffy.

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This new volume of JHU Press's landmark Shelley edition contains posthumous poems edited from original manuscripts."The world will surely one day feel what it has lost," wrote Mary Shelley after Percy Bysshe Shelley's premature death in July 1822. Determined to hasten that day, she recovered his unpublished and uncollected poems and sifted through his surviving notebooks and papers. In Genoa during the winter of 1822–23, she painstakingly transcribed poetry "interlined and broken into fragments, so that the sense could only be deciphered and joined by guesses." Blasphemy and sedition laws prevented her from including her husband's most outspoken radical works, but the resulting volume, Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1824), was a magnificent display of Shelley's versatility and craftsmanship between 1816 and 1822. Few such volumes have made more difference to an author's reputation. The seventh volume of the acclaimed Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley extracts from Posthumous Poems those original poems and fragments Mary Shelley edited. The collection opens with Shelley's enigmatic dream vision The Triumph of Life, the last major poem he began—and, in the opinion of T. S. Eliot, the finest thing he ever wrote. There follow some of the most famous and beautiful of Shelley's short lyrics, narrative fragments, two unfinished plays, and other previously unreleased pieces. Upholding the standards of accuracy and comprehensiveness set by previous volumes, every item in Volume 7 has been newly edited from the original manuscripts, in some cases superseding texts that have stood since 1870. Extensive appendixes contain Mary Shelley's preface to Posthumous Poems, Shelley's source for "Ginevra," and preparatory material for his play Charles the First. Wide-ranging discussions of the poems' composition, influences, publication, circulation, reception, and critical history accompany detailed records of textual variants for each work. The editorial overview and commentaries offer insights into Mary Shelley's editorial strategies while proposing surprising new contexts and redatings. Volumes 4 to 6 are in preparation.

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Each selection has been thoroughly reedited, and the order of the poems has been rearranged in light of redating or other reconsiderations. All headnotes are new or updated, and many footnotes have been added, replaced, or revised. "Criticism" reflects the recent renaissance in Shelley studies, the greatest renaissance since 1870-92. All twenty-three essays are new to the Second Edition; among them are the work of Harold Bloom, Stuart Curran, Annette Wheeler Cafarelli, Michael Ferber, James Chandler, and Susan J. Wolfson. A Chronology, an updated Selected Bibliography, and an Index of Titles and First Lines are included.

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