In ‘Percy Bysshe Shelly: A Literary Life’ , Michael O’Neill gives a knowledgeable and balanced account of Shelley’s literary career from his earliest published work to his last unfinished masterpiece, The Triumph of Life . The book draws on recent research about the poet and his age, but its sense of the ways in which texts and contexts interact is sharply independent. Issues discussed include Shelley’s social background, his radical politics and his complex response to Enlightenment rationalism. O’Neill stresses Shelley’s often disappointed search for an audience, connecting it with the growing sophistication of his poetry and poetics. For Shelley, a poet was the ‘combined product’ of ‘internal powers’ and ‘external influences’ (Preface to Prometheus Unbound ); this book explores how such a combination manifests itself in his own writings.
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