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This chapter focuses on Mary Shelley's career as a biographer and her role in shaping the afterlives of Percy Shelley from the 1820s. It reads her fragmented attempts at a posthumous memoir (an early, unpublished sketch, followed by three influential editions of his work) in the context of the wider picture of biography at the period – looking at the influence of William Godwin, Mary Hays, and Thomas Moore on her work. It reads her ‘Lives’ of Shelley in relation to her major biographical publication in the 1830s: her essays for Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia. It looks at how her early, domesticated Shelley is gradually replaced by a man whose failures of domestic responsibility are tied to his refusal to connect with his readers. The final section reviews the later nineteenth‐century biographical literature on Shelley, by T. J. Hogg, Lady Shelley, and Edward Dowden.

The chapter attempts to uncover Percy Bysshe Shelley’s relationship with his mother, Elizabeth Shelley, in his infancy and youth. However, the limited material available requires the use of interpretive skills. The accounting begins with Lady Shelley’s life prior to marriage with Sir Timothy Shelley and residence at Field Place. From letters and third party accounts, Elizabeth Shelley’s maternal behavior and qualities during Percy’s birth and adolescence are theorized and discussed. The possible influence of these behaviors over Shelley’s childhood, his burgeoning talent, and his eventual outlook in life are also tackled. The extent of Lady Shelley’s maternal influence on Shelley’s adult life is also analyzed. Linkages between Shelley’s prevalent use of feminine and “goddess” ideas in his literary pieces and his mother’s undeniable influence on his psyche are explored. The remaining section analyzes the mother–son alliance in their complex relationship, in contrast to the typical maternal conflicts described in previous segments.

Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, and Byron all encountered Italy both as a vivid reality and as ‘classic ground’. Although their sojourns in Rome (especially that of Byron) were relatively brief, that ‘delightful’ city played a significant part in the lives of all three and features prominently in the work of Percy Shelley and Byron. Like the Shelleys (whose son had died in the city), Byron was affected by a sense of Rome as essentially a city of the dead; he regarded contemporary Romans (like the Greeks who feature in his earlier poetry) as degenerate inheritors of traditions they could never emulate. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage finds some consolation in the durabilities of classical literature but is haunted by the recognition that history is monotonously predictable. The Shelleys allowed themselves an interpretation which was less melancholy: the enduring energies of nature could point towards liberation and an escape from the ghostly constraints of history.

Shelley's later writing, despite its obvious fascination with Greece, represents Romanticism's most complicated engagement with Rome. Though considerable attention has been given to Shelley's Hellenism, scholars have little to say about Shelley's use of Rome. This chapter argues that such critical oversight has left us with an incomplete understanding of the meaning and importance of Shelley's Hellenism, one which cannot be remedied without a sharper sense of Shelley's appreciation of antiquity more broadly and of the relationship between Greece and Rome in particular. To watch the changing fortunes of Athens and Rome in such later works as The Philosophical View of Reform, the “Ode to Liberty,” The Defence of Poetry, and Hellas reveals the critical role that Rome plays in Shelley's historicism and his strategies for understanding the past, which, in turn, exposes the relationship of these techniques to the deeply political functions of Shelley's classicism and his historiography.

This chapter examines the treatment and explanation of the topics of apocalypse and millennium in the works of English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. It suggests that the succession of apocalypse by millennium, in the broadest political sense, has been a crucial subject throughout Shelley's poetic career. Some of the poems he wrote near the beginning of his career show the deep commitment to these themes that marks his later poetry. Some of the works that highlight the issue of apocalypse and millennium includes Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson and The Mask of Anarchy.

In this chapter, I show that Percy Shelley picks up on the waning of intellectual love in Wordsworth, continuing to develop this Romantic tradition after Wordsworth moves on to a more religious sensibility. The chapter outlines the development of Percy Shelley’s treatment of love over the entire course of his career. I examine five ‘clusters’ of writings that reveal his adoption, adaption, and revision of Wordsworthian, Godwinian, and Classical notions of love: (1) his essay ‘On Love’ (1819) and its related texts; (2) Queen Mab (1813) and the Alastorvolume (1815); (3) a sequence of lyrics from 1816-1818; (4) the Prometheus Unbound volume (1820); and (5) Epipsychidion (1821) and later poems. Shelleyan love has received the most scholarly attention in studies of Romanticism, yet it is almost always within the contexts of sex, sexuality, and metaphor; instead, I argue that Shelleyan love can also be understood as an aesthetic model of interconnectedness proposing a nascent negative dialectics, a concept developed by Theodor Adorno that both defers and affirms the reconciliation of subject and object at the heart of critical theory and love.

This chapter talks about the runaway romance between Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Godwin. Percy Bysshe Shelley was twenty-one in the early summer of 1814. Although he could not have known it, he had already lived two-thirds of his life. In the eight years that remained before he drowned in a storm off the coast of Italy, he would write some of the most celebrated poems in the English language. Sixteen-year-old Mary Godwin would survive her husband by twenty-nine years. A professional writer whose novels mimicked, commented on, and revised the forms and content of her parents' works, Mary was best known, until recently, as the author of Frankenstein and the steward of her husband's reputation. Percy was not widely appreciated until later in the nineteenth century. Controversial in life, he became a signature Romantic artist in death: a creative genius whose transcendent poetry excused, if it did not depend upon, unconventional behavior, an iconoclastic rebel who refused to kowtow to social expectations.

Chapter four examines Mary Shelley’s 1826 novel The Last Man, which tells the story of an incurable plague that kills all of humanity. Shelley interrogates the Romantic belief in the possibility of a medico-poetic panacea (cure all). The novel begins with a domestic drama whose tragedy is figured as incurable, and this metaphoric incurability sparks the far more literal plague. Characters react to both scourges by longing for a panacea, which, when it does not appear, plunges them into a despair that aggravates the initial illness. Shelley’s story critiques the binary mindset underwriting both total affirmation and rejection of panacea, posing a middle ground that offers literature as the palliation of a dying humanity. In the same way that medical philosophers like Jean Georges Cabanis tied the imperfection of medical knowledge to the necessity of palliative care, so The Last Man suggests that suffering and death are unavoidable, both individually and at a species level. In the novel, literature takes on the function of a palliative care doctor, shepherding humanity to its final end by ‘taking the mortal sting from pain’ and preserving its fragmentary memory (p. 5).

This chapter focuses on the time when Thomas Medwin informed Mary Shelley that he was writing a biography of his second cousin Percy Shelley, who had drowned off the coast of Italy almost a quarter century earlier. Medwin implied that he would mine the records of the 1817 Chancery suit in which Percy had lost guardianship of his children by Harriet Westbrook to detail the poet's desertion of his first wife and her subsequent suicide. An appalled Mary Shelley urged Medwin to give up the project entirely. At stake were the reputations of innocent people. “In modern society,” she protested, “there is no injury so great as dragging private names and private life before the world.” Medwin's book “would wound and injure the living,” Percy Shelley's daughter in particular.

Algernon Swinburne is possibly the first unapologetic misotheist who did not choose self-censorship and concealment but rather boldly announced his hatred of God. This earned him much hostility in return, and this chapter documents the reception of his controversial works. The influences on Swinburne, notably of Blake and Shelley, are also discussed, as well as how Swinburne put his own stamp on the theme of God-hatred by offering alternative pagan deities of fertility and love. Swinburne is not only unusual because he so openly declares his hatred of God but also because his eroticized work violated Victorian standards of decency in more ways than one. This chapter contains compelling close readings of Swinburne’s work, revealing just how radical his denunciations of both Yahweh and Christ were and documenting how this attitude was intertwined with his republicanism and working-class sympathies.

This introductory chapter explains the coverage of this book, which is about the interrelationship between the ideas of apocalypse and millennium in English Romantic poetry. The imminence of an apocalypse that will be succeeded by a millennium is a major topos in English Romantic poetry. This book examines the mention of these topics in the works of several Romantic English poets including William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats.

Romanticism can be understood as based upon and leading to a rejection of Rome and a love of Greece. This book challenges this model by showing the complex engagement that took place between Romantic period writers and the specifically Roman elements of their classical inheritance. In particular, Rome provided a focus for discussion of how to co-ordinate present and past, cultural inheritance and contemporary experience. This introductory chapter contrasts firstly Hölderlin and Goethe, and then Shelley and Byron, in order to exemplify two of the dominant ways in which that co-ordination was attempted. It concludes with Stendhal, and his differing perspective on Rome. Stendhal's point of view is aligned with the aesthetics of the picturesque and is seen as implying both a different relation to the classical past and a new historiography.

This chapter shifts the terms of previously rare discussions of Shelley’s letters to show that there is a comparable mode of self-fashioning across the letters and the poetry. The balance between communicating with friends and creating texts of abiding literary value comes to the fore in the relationship between the poem and the letter. This chapter reveals the significance of the connection between the two through close attention to the verbal echoes and biographical detail. Shelley’s experimentation with the idea of the ‘I,’ in the prose letter to the Gisbornes and in the Letter to Maria Gisborne, represents Shelley’s sophisticated epistolary practice, where the letter becomes far more than mere ore to be mined by biographical criticism just as the poem goes beyond the parameters of being a verse version of a private letter.

This chapter approaches the Romantic period as an instructive earlier moment for today’s digitally networked life, and views Shelley’s poetics as offering a compelling way of being a networked being. Shelley sat at the nexus of two contemporaneous discourses: proto-sociological discourse found in Scottish conjectural histories and Romantic-era reflections on poetic communication. From this position, Shelley engages in sociological and medial thinking. He offers the obscure medium of abstract poetry as a model for a specific form of social interaction suited to modernity: an interaction that would forge a middle way between an empty commercial kind of dependence and the total intersubjectivity that he calls “love.” Reading Epipsychidion (1821) in light of these concerns, and positing a “poetry of ambiversion” that allows for both connection and disconnection, this chapter suggests that Shelley arrives at a modern ethos of communication that is neither purely business-oriented nor amatory.

This chapter examines the depiction of the living form in Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem The Witch of Atlas. It shows how Shelley broke free from the narrative allegory implied by the ottava rima verse form of his romance into an original use of metaphorical language as symbol. It suggests that the fluid transparency of spirits and powers in this poem defines a certain phenomenology of life that is generative in the mode of epigenesist poetics.

Focusing on the range of meanings assigned to republican Rome and on the process by which Rome is compared to contemporary Britain in contexts ranging from Parliamentary debates to the writings of John Thelwall, S. T. Coleridge, Percy Shelly, and William Hazlittt, this chapter demonstrates how the diffusion of historical sense in British Romantic writing reveals the previously neglected relationship between the culture of republican Rome and the development of Romanticism in Britain. Attention to how these diverse figures interpret the legacy of republican Rome suggests that ‘Greece’ and ‘Rome’ were competitive and complementary fascinations; Greece did not replace Rome in the Romantic imagination, but the rise of Hellenism did enable sophisticated distinctions between Greece and Rome. By considering these distinctions, the chapter establishes Rome's crucial role in helping us understand the interpellation of politics and aesthetics in the Romantic period.

This chapter looks at how nineteenth-century biography picked up and transformed the image of the Romantic mad poet from earlier periodical criticism. This occurred first in brief lives and ‘cases of poetry’ in periodicals themselves, then in popular anthologies of the ‘infirmities of genius’, and finally in the larger narratives of poetic irrationality or anti-rationality presented in mid-Victorian literary biography. The chapter makes a particular case study of pivotal biographies in the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s by Thomas Medwin, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, Thomas Love Peacock, Alexander and Anne Gilchrist, Frederick Martin, and others writing on Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Blake, and John Clare respectively. The chapter uses readings of these poetic lives to propose a prehistory of twentieth-century psychoanalytic biography or psychobiographical criticism and its ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ (Paul Ricœur).

This chapter and the next focus on the writings of Percy Shelley in order to examine social history as an ontogenetic and biopoetic force. Reading, anew, a poem that has been the touchstone of critical arguments about the relation between life, matter, language, and history in Romantic poetics, this chapter argues that Shelley’s The Triumph of Life mobilizes Lucretian materialist poetics to articulate the way personal bodies produce and integrate passages of historical time. Against the influential de Manian view that the poem’s “disfigured” faces allegorize the linguistic violence inherent in figuration as a function of reparative reading, the chapter focuses on the neglected final “Vision” in the poem that ceases to construe prosopopoeia as a principally verbal or cognitive process at all. Instead, Shelley adapts De rerum natura to cast personal senescence as the unintended work of multitudes, depicting wrinkling faces as mutable registers of the “living air” of a post-Napoleonic interval. Here The Triumph presses toward a biology and epistemology of senescence that, like Walter Benjamin’s “weak messianism,” refutes the triumphalist narrative vitalist life science shared with post-Waterloo historiography.