Guest Contributors
My goal when I established this site was not just to afford an outlet for my own writing on various subjects, but also to draw attention to what others have to say. I hope that every week I will be able to offer readers fresh ideas and perspectives not only by poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, but also those in his circle: Mary, Claire Clairmont, Byron, Keats, Leigh Hunt and others.
What Shelley Means to Me
Allow me to introduce you to Oliver. Oliver popped up one day on my twitter feed. Oliver’s pronouns are they/their and they are a high school student living in Michigan. Oliver has an incredible passion for poetry and Shelley in particular. Oliver started asking for book recommendations - and they devoured them. They started doing research and bringing new findings and perspectives to our twitter feeds. Oliver started engaging with a large cross-section of the online Shelley community - ranging from amateur fans to some of the most respected academic authorities in the world!
Shelley in a Revolutionary World
There’s something in the Romanticism of Percy Shelley that seems always on the verge of breaking down the gate-posts of history and gusting into our world. The archival shackles in which the academic humanities prefer to keep their spectral versifiers and yawping hobgoblins enclosed seem especially frangible and ill-suited to the reluctant baronet’s “sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.” Shelley is present in our efforts to meet and counteract the predicaments of our moment (from the mendacious mis-rule of government elites to the devastation of natural habitats for profit) in a way that Wordsworth, scrummily in awe of Nature and his own perception of it, is not – or at least, not so fluently.
Paul Foot Speaks: The Revolutionary Percy Bysshe Shelley!!!
This is Paul Foot’s speech to the London Marxism Conference of 1981. His objective is to reconnect the left with Shelley. He does so in a surprising and original manner which is altogether convincing. Foot ably and competently traces the evolution of the modern left and demonstrates how it became disconnected from “the masses,” from real people with real-world concerns and issues. He longs for the “enthusiasm” that Shelley brought to the table. If ever there was a convincing “call to arms” that involves educating one’s self in the philosophy of a poet dead for 200 years, this is it.