Shelley: The Pursuit [Paperback]

Shelley: The Pursuitis 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.Richard Holmesis the author ofShelley: The Pursuit(published by NYRB Classics), which won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1974;Coleridge: Early Visions, winner of the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year award;Dr. Johnson & Mr. Savage, which won the 1993 James Tait Black Prize; andColeridge: Darker Reflections, which won the 1990 Duff Cooper Prize and Heinemann Award. His other works includeFootsteps(1985) andSidetracks(2000). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 1992. He is also a professor of biographical studies at the University of East Anglia. He lives in London and Norwich with the novelist Rose Tremain.US