Shelley: The Pursuit: The Pursuit (Literary Biographies S.) (New York Review Books Classics)

by Richard Holmes

Sir Richard Holmes (Introduction) and Richard Holmes (Introduction)

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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.
  • ISBN10 1590170377
  • ISBN13 9781590170373
  • Publish Date 31 May 2003 (first published 25 July 1974)
  • Publish Status Active
  • Publish Country US
  • Publisher The New York Review of Books, Inc
  • Imprint NYRB Classics