num_pages: 830
description: Shelley: The Pursuit is the book with which Richard Holmes—the finest literary biographer of our day—made his name. Dispensing with the long-established Victorian picture of Shelley as a blandly ethereal character, Holmes projects a startling image of "a darker and more earthly, crueler and more capable figure." Expelled from college, disowned by his aristocratic father, driven from England, Shelley led a life marked from its beginning to its early end by a violent rejection of society; he embraced rebellion and disgrace without thought of the cost to himself or to others. Here we have the real Shelley—radical agitator, atheist, apostle of free love, but above all a brilliant and uncompromising poetic innovator, whose life and work have proved an essential inspiration to poets as varied as W.B. Yeats and Allen Ginsberg.
language: English
title: Shelley: The Pursuit
titlecomplete: Shelley: The Pursuit
characters: Percy Bysshe Shelley
genres: Biography, Romanticism, Poetry, British Literature, Nonfiction, Literature, 19th Century, Biography Memoir, 20th Century, History
ratings_count: 392
awards: awardedAt: 220953600000
name: Somerset Maugham Award
publisher: NYRB Classics