Penguin Classics: Selected Poems And Prose

Introduction and notes by Jack Donovan and Cian Duffy

Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly; Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of Eternity. Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the most boldly original, experimental and distinctive voices of the English Romantic movement. This new collection brings together nearly all his major writings, with poems ranging from exquisitely crafted lyrics to substantial verse compositions such as Queen Maband Prometheus Unbound, and prose works that include reflective and speculative essays on subjects as varied as religion, vegetarianism and the Devil – as well as his great plea in favour of literary creation, A Defence of Poetry. Together they show an artist of remarkable intellectual range, technical accomplishment and radical vision, whose work weaves together the political, the personal and the imaginative.