Shelley, Percy Bysshe

Note books of Percy Bysshe Shelley, From the Orginials in the Library of W.K. Bixby (Collected Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley)

Average customer rating:

Note books of Percy Bysshe Shelley, From the Orginials in the Library of W.K. Bixby (Collected Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley)
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Manufacturer: Classic Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Library Binding
ASIN: 0742621375

Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments (Collected Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley 2 volumes)

Average customer rating:

Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments (Collected Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley 2 volumes)
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Manufacturer: Classic Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Library Binding
ASIN: 0742621359

The Esdaile Notebook (Collected Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley)

Average customer rating:

Bitter Sweet

The Esdaile Notebook (Collected Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley)
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Manufacturer: Classic Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Library Binding
ASIN: 0742621391

Customer Reviews:

Bitter Sweet.......2000-03-29

I found this book very interesting. Shelley is an excellent poet, yet filled with bitterness toward monarchists. The notebook is an excellent collections of Shelley's wooks and includeds pictures as well as comments. A great book to read.

The Esdaile Poems (Collected Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley)

Average customer rating:

The Esdaile Poems (Collected Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley)
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Manufacturer: Classic Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Library Binding
ASIN: 0742621405

The Wandering Jew (Collected Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley)

Average customer rating:

The Wandering Jew (Collected Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley)
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Manufacturer: Classic Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Library Binding
ASIN: 0742621367

An Address, to the Irish People (Collected Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley)

Average customer rating:

An Address, to the Irish People (Collected Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley)
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Manufacturer: Classic Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Library Binding
ASIN: 0742621170

Shelley: Poems (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets)

Average customer rating:

Great for what it is
One-dimensional selection, in Victorian confection
Wonderful, but slightly one dimensional
Excellent Shelly Collection

Shelley: Poems (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets)
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Manufacturer: Everyman's Library
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Look Inside Fiction Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books
Similar Items:

Byron: Poems (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets)
Keats: Poems (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets)
Coleridge: Poems (Pocket Poets Series)
Wordsworth: Poems (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets)
Blake: Poems (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets)

ASIN: 0679429093
Release Date: 1993-11-02

Customer Reviews:

Great for what it is.......2005-05-04

If you are looking for a comprehensive collection of Shelley's poetry, this is not the volume to purchase. For that, I would recommend the Modern Library edition, the Oxford Major Works edition, or the Norton selection. This pocket edition, however, is wonderful for several reasons. First, it includes a generous selection of some of Shelley's best-loved works. Second, the publication itself is high quality. And third, the pocket size allows you to take Shelley along as the perfect companion in your day to day travels or when you're amongst nature. As long as you know what you're buying here (not a complete edition), I don't think you'll be disappointed.

One-dimensional selection, in Victorian confection.......2001-10-18

Suppose someone published a Shakespeare selection, that included pretty set pieces from the plays ("Queen Mab! What's she?" from _Romeo and Juliet_, "I know a bank whereon the wild thyme grows" from _Midsummer Night's Dream_), bits of _The Rape of Lucrece_ and _Venus and Adonis_, every last one of the "Sonnetf to Sundrie Notef of Mufic_, and a few songs: "It was a lover and his lass," and the like. But anything that hinted at a darker worldview or Shakespeare's wider range was ruthlessly excluded.

And suppose further that this anthology claimed that it represented Shakespeare's best work, showing his range and the things that make that writer great. So that anyone who knew Shakespeare through that anthology would think that he was good for the odd flower poem and a bit of "Hey nonny nonny" but not much else besides.

Isobel Quigly's _Shelley: A Selection_ is the Shelleyan equivalent of that Shakespeare anthology. Thus, Shelley's epic philosophical drama _Prometheus Unbound_, both a meditation about the relationship between thought and language and a metaphor for political renewal based on moral growth (among other things), is represented by a couple of incidental lyrics; all complexity and depth are left on Quigly's cutting room floor. _Julian and Maddalo_, with its urbanity, its bitter wit, crisp dialogue and vivid characterisation, is represented by one short purple passage (admittedly a splendid one) describing sunset over the Euganean hills.

The satirical Shelley is not represented at all: the contemptuous handling of contemporary political figures in the energetically grotesque _Oedipus Tyrannus_ is missing in action, as is the more nuanced satire of _Peter Bell the Third_. Oh, and the real Shelley may have been passionately engaged in the real world, protesting poverty, war and oppression in general and by specifics, in hard detail and in words of fire: but you won't find a hint of that in Quigly's selection. Many of Shelley's finest poems are simply omitted. _The Mask of Anarchy_ , _Song to the Men of England_, _Similes for Two Political Characters_, _Feelings of a Republican on Hearing the Death of Napoleon_, for example, and much else besides: Quigly won't trouble you with a word of it.

What she gives instead is every "pretty" poem Shelley ever wrote. That includes great lyrics like the _Ode to the West Wind_ and _To a Skylark_ and others, but also all the poems Shelley dashed off as gifts to women friends, often for them to use as song lyrics, and often written to fit existing tunes. These became enormously popular anthology pieces in the Victorian period, though Shelley himself showed little interest in them and never bothered to publish them.

It's not that these are bad poems. All are good of their kind, and many conceal a hard metaphysical kernel under a candied surface: _When the lamp is shattered_, and _Music when soft voices die_, for example. Shelley was in a sense more of a metaphysical than a romantic poet, and in another sense more of a metaphysical poet than the metaphysicals themselves, since he was often concerned with genuine metaphysical questions in his poetry: thought and language, epistemology, and so on.

But [...] Shelley is a minor and one-dimensional poet on the basis of this selection. But it's the selection at fault, not the poet.

Quigly also, irritatingly, strips poems of their contexts. She gives _Alastor_ and (surprisingly in view of its Dantean difficulties) _Epipsychidion_ complete, but rips away the prefaces that Shelley used, in each case, as part of his framing and distancing effect: they are important to the way in which the poem is to be presented, and to be approached.

She also follows the Victorians in getting various telling details wrong. Thus _The Indian Girl's Serenade_ is printed as _The Indian Serenade_; the change allowed the Victorians to treat the poem as a personal lyric rather than a performance piece, and to marvel over Shelley's exquisite but rather weak sensibility: "O lift me from the grass! I die, I faint, I fall!"

The name change conceals the fact that this poem was written for soprano performance (to a tune from Mozart's _La Clemenza di Tito_). Its charm is that it allows the performer opportunities to both use feminine wiles and at the same time mock them. The "faint" at the end of the song is best performed, by the singer, with one eye open to judge the effect. But Quigly knows nothing of this, referring to Shelley's "wholly personal love poems" in her wholly clueless introduction.

Quigly's introduction clearly places her as a late surviving Victorian, who has read a little Leavis and Elliot but nothing of the critical work done on Shelley up to this anthology's first publication date, which is 1956. Nothing has changed in this recent re-publication, despite the rich and fascinating work in Shelley criticism and Shelley studies in the years since Leavis. But Quigly wouldn't be the person to guide you through that material anyway.

I recommend the Norton Selection of Shelley's poetry and prose instead, with a much better and wider selection, and intelligent introduction and notes. And it's quite reasonable to want the romantic (in the Valentine's Day sense) Shelley, though that is only one side of a multi-faceted poet of astounding technical skill, sophistication and range: but for that side of Shelley I'd recommend Richard Hughes' _Shelley on Love_. Either selection is far better than this vapid and misleading collection of prettiana.

Cheers!

Laon
PS Also avoid Penguin's Poet to Poet series' Shelley entry. 20th century poetaster Kathryn Raine's Shelley selection is if anything slighter than Quigly's.

Wonderful, but slightly one dimensional.......2001-09-29

Shelly was a master at combining images and creating a world that was uniquley his own. The problem is, that world seemed to consist mainly of foggy sea shores at sunrise and forest cathedrals. While there is nothing wrong with visiting such a world, there is very little reason to stay there.

Shelly's lyrics are uneven, sometimes resorting to rhymes that make me cringe. His strength is iambic prose. Even this suffers from what appears to be a limited vocabulary which para doxically inclused eccentric spellings like "aery".

Having said all that, I must admit that I am in sypmpathy with Shelly. He dwells in a solitary world of fairy beauty that is the spiritual home of every soul in search of Truth. This goes a long way toward forgiving his somewhat middle ground talent.

"Queen Mab" and "Alastor" are the best peoms in this collection. Most of the other seem to be either comments or footnotes to these. They encompass Shelly's strange universe beautifully.

"Alastor" is the strongest in terms of imagery reflecting isolation and the hard choice to foresake worldy pleasure to find a higher truth. All sorts of moonlit coves lie just past the crashing waves of the main stream. One only wishes that Shelly could see the beauty he was leaving was a part of what he sought.

I recomment this edition, and the critical essay at its beginning, as a starting point for study of Shelly and his work.

Excellent Shelly Collection.......2000-05-09

I very much enjoyed this collection. It introduced me to the poignant poetry of one of the greatest English Romantic writers. Shelly is a poet you will most likely be required to read at some point in your life. If not, you would be doing a serious diservice to yourself to not seek to indulge in his writings by your own accord. "Song to the Men of England" is perhaps my favourite Shelly poem, despite the fact that it illustrates the utter hypocrisy of English aristocrats. This collection is bound beautifully, and includes all of the poems Shelly was famous for. It is priced reasonably, so there should therefore be no reason for you not to pick it up!

English Romantic Poetry: An Anthology (Dover Thrift Editions)

Average customer rating:

Good for the price
The poetry itself
A Great Poetry Collection for the Price
A pretty good anthology
GREAT

English Romantic Poetry: An Anthology (Dover Thrift Editions)
William Blake , William Wordsworth , Samuel Taylor Coleridge , Lord Byron , Percy Bysshe Shelley , and John Keats
Manufacturer: Dover Publications
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Anthologies | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

All 4-for-3 Deals | 4-for-3 Books Store | Stores | Books

Qualifying Textbooks - Spring 2007 | Stores | Books
Similar Items:

English Victorian Poetry: An Anthology (Dover Thrift Editions)
Metaphysical Poetry: An Anthology (Dover Thrift Editions)
Heart of Darkness (Dover Thrift Editions)
Essay on Man and Other Poems (Dover Thrift Editions)
The Importance of Being Earnest (Dover Thrift Editions)

ASIN: 0486292827

Book Description

Rich selection of 123 poems by 6 great English Romantic poets: William Blake (24 poems), William Wordsworth (27 poems), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (10 poems), Lord Byron (16 poems), Percy Bysshe Shelley (24 poems) and John Keats (22 poems). Introduction and brief commentaries on the poets.

Customer Reviews:

Good for the price.......2007-01-04

I was teaching the "English Romantics" to a small class of students. I needed something cheap. This did the job although it has no footnotes or annotations to the text. Introduction to each poet is helpful but limited in scope.

Bill Kurry

The poetry itself .......2006-10-10

I think most readers know what they are going to get with a 'Dover edition or reprint'. An attractive, spartan looking volume( It has changed in recent years and their volumes are more colorful) without extensive commentary or note. The works themselves.
In this case it is a collection of the poetry of the great Romantics, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron.
There are of course many anthologies of this poet, most with more elaborate notes and explication.
But I love many of these poems so much that I am happy to see them again in any new edition.
The poetry of the English Romantic period is among the greatest Mankind has.
On that basis primarily I would recommend this volume.

A Great Poetry Collection for the Price.......2004-06-24

Dover Thrift Edition books are known for providing classical literature for a great price, without abridging the material (unless they say so of course). This anthology is no exception. The best poets of the English Romantic period are included, including two of my favorites, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. Blake, Byron, Shelley, and Keats are also represented quite liberally.

Don't expect too much of this anthology outside of the actual poems themselves though. It is a Thrift Edition after all. The paper is strong, but not of the highest quality. There are brief introductions to each of the poets, but no real commentary or notes on the poems themselves. The editor does translate some of the ancient languages that the poets occasionally employ, like Latin and Greek. At the end there is an index of first-lines and titles. Also, I have to say, that these are not "romantic" as modern readers often use the term. "Romantic" refers to an era of art, music, philosophy, and literature where artists and writers allowed their emotions to overflow using a whole host of symbols, creating great works that owed more to the depths of the Imagination than the rational intellect. Coleridge was himself a theologian and philosopher and expressed many of his ideas of Imagination and eternal Symbol in his poems. Overall, this is a good sampling of some of the finest poetry available. Factoring in price and quantity, it is definitely 4 stars.

A pretty good anthology.......2002-08-01

The price is certainly right. I used this book to teach a high-school poetry class. The selection of Blake is the weakest part of it: the selections from Innocence and Experience aren't ample enough to give a real sense for the book, and exclude some lyrics that I just couldn't do without (e.g. the "Holy Thursday" of Experience). The complete lack of notes (which originally I thought of as a plus :->) led to some unnecessary pain for students -- I remember one attempted close-reading of "The Extinction of the Venetian Republic" which toiled slowly through the poem, dealing with mysteries that wouldn't have been mysterious at all if there had been even a brief note on the political context of the poem.

On the plus side, there is not a bad poem in the whole book: every rift is loaded with ore. And it's an attractive paperback, nicely typeset, comfortable in the hands: it doesn't feel like a cheapo-cheapo book, which you'd rather expect from the price.

GREAT.......2000-06-10

It has some of the best poems i have ever read in them! there is a need to buy this book if u are hopelessly devoted to love poems!

Shelley's Poetry and Prose (Norton Critical Edition)

Average customer rating:

A Simple List
A fiery Romantic
A Hero
Pure Intellectual Beauty
Indispensable

Shelley's Poetry and Prose (Norton Critical Edition)
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton & Company
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Qualifying Textbooks - Spring 2007 | Stores | Books
Similar Items:

Lord Byron: The Major Works (Oxford World's Classics)
Coleridge's Poetry and Prose (Norton Critical Edition)
Byron's Poetry (Norton Critical Edition)
John Keats: The Complete Poems (Penguin Classics)
The Major Works: Including The Prelude (Oxford World's Classics)

ASIN: 0393977528

Book Description

This volume contains one of the fullest, and certainly the most accurately edited, collections of Shelley's poetry and prose available.

This Second Edition is based on the authoritative texts established by Reiman and Fraistat for their scholarly edition, The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Each poetry and prose selection has been reedited from the ground up. Headnotes detailing the textual history of Shelley's major works have been revised and expanded, and many new and revised footnotes are included.

The years since 1977—when the First Edition appeared—have witnessed a renaissance in Shelley studies greater than any since 1870-92. All 23 critical selections are new, and include analysis of Shelley's manuscripts and other textual sources for his writing as well as interpretations.

A Chronology, rigorously updated Selected Bibliography, and Index of Titles and First Lines are also included.

<B>About the series</B>: No other series of classic texts equals the caliber of the <B>Norton Critical Editions</B>. Each volume combines the most authoritative text available with the comprehensive pedagogical apparatus necessary to appreciate the work fully. Careful editing, first-rate translation, and thorough explanatory annotations allow each text to meet the highest literary standards while remaining accessible to students. Each edition is printed on acid-free paper and every text in the series remains in print. Norton Critical Editions are the choice for excellence in scholarship for students at more than 2,000 universities worldwide.

Customer Reviews:

A Simple List.......2006-11-02

This text is a great one, as are all of the Norton anthologies that I have bought over the years. The works it contains are as follows:

Poetry:
"Queen Mab"
"Alastor"
"Stanzas -- April, 1814"
"Mutability"
"To Wordsworth"
"Hymn to Intellectual Beauty"
"Mont Blanc"
Excerpts from "Laon and Cynthia"
"To Constantia"
"Ozymandias"
"Lines written among the Euganean Hills"
"Julian and Maddalo"
"Stanza written in Dejection"
"The Two Spirits -- an Allegory"
"The Cenci"
"Prometheus Unbound"
"The Sensitive-Plant"
"Ode to Heaven"
"Ode to the West Wind"
"The Cloud"
"To a Sky-Lark"
"Ode to Liberty"
"The Mask of Anarchy"
"England in 1819"
"Sonnet: To the Republic of Benevento"
"Sonnet ('Lift not the painted veil')"
"Sonnet ('Ye hasten to the grave!')"
"Letter to Maria Gisborne"
"Peter Bell the Third"
"The Witch of Atlas"
"Song of Apollo"
"Song of Pan"
"Epipsychidion"
"Adonais"
"Hellas"
"Written on Hearing the News of the Death of Napoleon"
"The Indian Girl's Song"
"Song ('Rarely, rarely comest thou')"
"The Flower that Smiles Today"
"Memory"
"To ------ ('Music, when soft voices die')"
"When Passion's Trance Is Overpast"
"To Jane. The Invitation"
"To Jane. The Recollection"
"One Word Is Too Often Profaned"
"The Serpent Is Shut Out from Paradise Lost"
"With a Guitar. To Jane."
"To Jane ('The keen stars were twinkling')"
"Lines written in the Bay of Lerici
"The Triumph of Life"

Prose:
"On Love"
"On Life"
"A Defence of Poetry"

As per Norton tradition, most of the major works and some of the lesser ones have an introduction before them in which historical context is given, major themes explained, and important images or ideas are revealed. This collection also contains twenty-two critical essays by scholars such as Harold Bloom, Michael O'Neill, and Susan J. Wolfson, on Shelley and his life and art, including eleven work-specific critical essays.
What a great collection!

A fiery Romantic.......2006-10-14

Shelley is a figure of fire; whenever I read any of his works I sense a tremendous energy and vitality, and a great love of life in all its forms.

Shelley lived by the ideals he set out in his poetry and also his radical politics; complete freedom and the embracement of individual choice, and the rejection of all forms of authority which strangled creativity and the human spirit. At the level of his art, this led to Shelley becoming one of the finest poets of the Romantic era and of the English language for all time, but unfortunately in his personal life and his financial situations, disaster.

Always a restless spirit, Shelley was always on the move; he composed some of his finest poems while he lived for a time in Italy. His work covers a wide range from political pamphlets and criticism (such as his essay 'A defence of poetry') to plays and poems of various types and lengths. His most brilliant poems include an Ode to Keats, 'Prometheus Unbound', and 'Queen Mab', a scathing attack on conventional religious values and political tyranny.

One of Shelley's most attractive aspects is his deep love for and sensitivity to the beauty of nature. Shelley was well read in natural sciences and Astronomy and many of his finest poems (including one addressed to a thunderstorm) capture in vivid colour and detail the changes and endless activity of nature.

Unfortunately Shelley died at the tragically young age of 29 in a boating accident related to a storm, caused to a large degree by his own foolhardy nature. But perhaps there was no more fitting an end to such a fiery, unstable and poetically creative man as him.

This edition contains a good sample of his works as well as several critical essays on Shelley and his work.

A Hero.......2005-07-13

Percy Bysshe Shelley is undoubtedly one of the double handful of master poets of the English language. He's something more to many of us, a figure of great charisma and daring who spent his life in relentless search of a better way to be than what we're perpetually settling for, politically, erotically, personally. This quest took him into several flavors of exile, and into darker places within; early on he abandoned belief and near the end, some say, abandoned hope. But he wrote what it was like all the way through, and what it should be like, and why writing what it should be like is crucial. He searched always for the road forward, refusing the easy lie of naming the ground beneath his feet that road. Not that he was what we would call an existentialist: his vision of what might prove possible in life marries all the little-but-infinite scenes of love, discovery, and sublimity he'd experienced and never forgotten, and was always at work recasting in stronger and surer words and images.

His most important writings are mid-length and longer pieces. This is something of a paradox as all agree he is anyone's equal as a lyric poet. I recommend his crazy, brilliant early poem "Alastor" as a beginning point. It sketches out the quest he never left off from and gives a heavy, tonic dose of poetry as he conceived it: a stripping off of fear, remorse and all other artificial limits, including those of our very senses, and a dive into the furious streaming colliding fires of the true world to find what's lost there. It's a bit like the visionary journey the astronaut takes near the end of the film 2001. Without the fetus.

This is a great selection, omitting little of importance. The first edition carried all the same poems, but a mostly different set of critical essays. A slightly fuller selection is in print in the Oxford World's Classics series, with less critical apparatus for those who like to go it alone. Shelley's works have a tangled textual history, so I'd advise going with these professional selections and no other (two editions of Shelley's complete works are finally in progress, I'm happy to say).

Pure Intellectual Beauty.......2000-06-09

Shelley is the wild child of English poetry and his determined opposition to tyranny produced a huge variety of poetry, ranging from the rending lament of Keats in Adonais, to the defiant and taut sonnet Ozymandias. His single greatest work, however, is Prometheus Unbound, which a vast gothic ruin of neat poetry. One shot of it and you'll wonder why a) all the nice, obvious prosy bits seem to have been left out and b) why exactly you love it, and him, so much. Like a cross between a vision of God and a lobotomy.

It's strange, but he means it and the grand sweep of the poem and its rebirth of humanity (I did say this isn't kitchen sink drama) is as distinctive an experience as reading Milton for the first time or the first time you read a love letter in the bath. Holding an electric fire.

There are many other poems which should be headline news, such as Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, Mont Blanc, Mutability and Ode to the West Wind, but this edition also has the advantage of including the Defence of Poetry which is the most rhapsodic and emotive arguments you'll ever have the pleasure to be swept away by. For a second you want to believe the beautiful nonsense that 'poets are the unackowledged legislators of the world'. Shelley pulls no punches in prose because he hasn't pulled any in poetry. He believes in the prophetic importance of his role and is electric enough to almost make us belive him.

This is the best student edition of Shelley's works in print. Not according to me, but to a Professor in Romantic Poetry at Oxford University. Not a bad recommendation!

The essays in this volume are generally helpful and explain the structures of the poems where useful. They are also refreshingly short. Shelley is a poet who has run close to obscurity due to reams of bad criticism (by figures as famous as Matthew Arnold and FR Leavis) who have mistaken his extraordinary originality for weakness. An easy mistake, I'm sure. Shelley's poetry is all in the mind, and the lack of concreteness can be frustrating. A bit like flying can be so much more tiresome than walking.

Indispensable.......2000-02-20

If you only buy one book of Shelley's works -- make it this one.

This edition contains all Shelley's major poetry, as well as three essays (see table of contents on this page).

The bonus is that, as this is a critical edition, it also contains 15 brief critical essays, which are among the best explications you'll find of Shelley's work. (Since it's a critical edition, the poems are also heavily footnoted, something you'll either love or hate.)

The only downside is that a number of Shelley's shorter and lighter poems are absent (e.g., "Love's Philosophy"), and only a small portion of "Laon and Cyntha" appears here -- but overall the selection is solid. And, like all the Norton critical editions, this is printed on decent paper, eye-straining, tissue-thin stock found in some other volumes.

Book Description

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 humor 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 reappropriation 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.

Authors:

Authors

Authors