The book is an authoritative and up-to-date collection of original essays on one of the greatest of all English poets, Percy Bysshe Shelley. It covers a wide range of topics, exploring Shelley's life and work from many angles. It looks at his emotional relationships and his dealings with publishers; at his prose writing (often overlooked); at the whole range of his prolific and dazzling poetic career; at his response to major figures in European culture such asclassical Greek writing and work by Rousseau and Goethe, and to previous English poets such as Spenser, Milton, and Pope, as well as to his Romantic contemporaries; it also brings out the exciting range of his interests, providing chapters on topics such as science and music, and it investigates Shelley's meaning for subsequent writers and cultures.

Michael O'Neill is a well-known critic of poetry, and has written monographs on Shelley (1989), Romanticism and the Self-Conscious Poem (1997), and The All-Sustaining Air (2007). He edited The Cambridge History of English Poetry (2010), and has also co-edited (with Madeleine Callaghan) Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry: Hardy to Mahon (2011), and a much-praised anthology of Romantic poetry with detailed comments on poetic form (2007), both for Blackwell. He has published two collections of poems, and received a Cholmondeley Award for Poets in 1990. His work has been much praised by many critics for its sensitivity to poetry and its ability to find an answerable language for poetic effects.

Anthony Howe has taught at both Cambridge and Oxford Universities and is currently Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Birmingham City University. He has published essays on Byron and Shelley and is currently finishing a monograph entitled Byron and the Forms of Thought for Liverpool University Press.

Madeleine Callaghan is Lecturer in Romantic Literature at the University of Sheffield. Her research specialty is the poetry of Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Yeats, and she also has research interests in post-war British and Irish poetry. She is the co-editor (with Michael O'Neill) of Twentieth Century British and Irish Poetry: Hardy to Mahon.

Introduction, Michael O'Neill
BIOGRAPHY AND RELATIONSHIPS
Shelley and the British Isles, Donald H. Reiman and James Bieri
Shelley and Italy, Ralph Pite
Resolutions, Destinations: Shelley s Last Year, Ann Wroe
Shelley and Women, Nora Crook
Shelley and his Publishers, Stephen Behrendt
PART 2 PROSE
Shelley and Philosophy: On a Future State, Speculations on Metaphysics and Morals, On Life, Anthony Howe
Religion and Ethics: The Necessity of Atheism, A Refutation of Deism, On Christianity, Gavin Hopps
Love, Sexuality, Gender: On Love, Discourse on Love, and The Banquet of Plato, Teddi Lynn Chichester
Politics and Satire, Steven E. Jones
Politics, Protest, and Social Reform: Irish Pamphlets, Notes to Queen Mab, Letter to Lord Ellenborough, A Philosophical View of Reform, Michael Scrivener
Poetics, Paul Hamilton
Prose Fiction: Zastrozzi, St. Irvyne, The Assassins, The Coliseum, Diane Long Hoeveler
Shelley's Letters, Daisy Hay
PART 3 POETRY
Shelley's Draft Notebooks, Nancy Moore Goslee
Lyric Development: Esdaile Notebook to Hymns of 1816, David Duff
Epic Experiments: Queen Mab and Laon and Cythna, Jack Donovan
Quest Poetry: Alastor and Epipsychidion, Mark Sandy
Lyrical Drama: Prometheus Unbound and Hellas, Stuart Curran
Tragedy: The Cenci and Swellfoot the Tyrant, Michael Rossington
Shelley's Familiar Style : Rosalind and Helen, Julian and Maddalo, and Letter to Maria Gisborne, Anthony Howe
Sonnets and Odes, Michael O'Neill
Popular Songs and Ballads: Writing the Unwritten Story in 1819, Susan Wolfson
Visionary Rhyme: The Sensitive-Plant and The Witch of Atlas, Jerrold E. Hogle
Lyrics and Love Poems: Poems to Sophia Stacey, Jane Williams, and Mary Shelley, Shahidha Bari
Shelley's Pronouns: Lyrics, Hellas, Adonais, and The Triumph of Life, Michael O'Neill
PART 4 CULTURES, TRADITIONS, INFLUENCES
Shelley and the Bible, Ian Balfour
Shelley, Mythology, and the Classical Tradition, Anthony John Harding
Shelley and the Italian Tradition, Alan Weinberg
Origins of Evil: Shelley, Goethe, Calderon, and Rousseau, Frederick Burwick
Shelley and Milton, Madeleine Callaghan
Shelley and the English Tradition: Spenser and Pope, Michael O'Neill and Paige Tovey
Shelley and His Contemporaries, Kelvin Everest
Shelley and Music, Jessica K. Quillin
Shelley, Shakespeare, and Theatre, Bernard Beatty
Shelley, the Visual Arts, and Cinema, Sarah Wootton
Shelley's Sciences, Marilyn Gaull
Shelley, Travel, and Tourism, Benjamin Colbert
PART FIVE AFTERLIVES
Shelley and the Nineteenth Century, Richard Cronin
The Influences of Shelley on Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Poetry, Jeffrey C. Robinson
Editing Shelley, Michael Rossington
Shelley Criticism from Romanticism to Modernism, Jane Stabler
Shelley Criticism from Deconstruction to the Present, Arthur Bradley