Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poet and revolutionary

Jacqueline Mulhallen, Pluto Press, 170 pages, £12.99

Today, you can find memorials to Percy Bysshe Shelley in Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey and at Oxford University. Most famous for poems such as To A skylark, Ozymandias and The mask of anarchy, he is considered a major Romantic poet. 


But this was not always the case. During his short and tragic life he was regarded with loathing as an immoral atheist, and his work received damning reviews as a result. 


The focus on his beliefs around sexual freedom and vegetarianism often eclipses his internationalist and revolutionary politics. Although he wrote when the working class was in its infancy, he clearly grasped how workers — and women — were oppressed. 


Admired by Oscar Wilde, Thomas Hardy, W. B. Yeats and Karl Marx, Shelley’s words have been used by popular movements from the Chartists and the Suffragettes to Tiananmen Square, the Poll Tax protesters and modern Greek solidarity movements. 


This new biography by playwright and activist Jacqueline Mulhallen emphasises the political, revolutionary side of Shelley’s life, and is a valuable contribution to the existing literature on this most revolutionary of poets. 


Reviews contributed by the Bookmarks socialist bookshop.


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