Shelley's Greek

Percy Bysshe Shelley was unique among the major English Romantics in being a sensitive and rigorous reader of ancient Greek texts, and in being occupied with reading, translating, and drawing on those texts throughout his creative maturity. The writing that resulted from these activities plays a crucial role in some of Shelley's major intellectual aspirations after his departure for Italy in 1818: to fashion intellectual communities, to think about the poet's relationship to tradition, and to intervene in contemporary political debates. To examine the relationship between these concerns and the creative processes through which Shelley articulated them, this book reconsiders how he translated, alluded to, and refashioned ancient Greek literature. Addressing much-studied poems such as 'Ode to Liberty', 'The Triumph of Life', and 'The Witch of Atlas', as well as texts that have received less critical scrutiny ('Athenase', 'The Coliseum', Ode to Naples), alongside his translations of Plato's Symposium as 'The Banquet' and the Homeric Hymn to Hermes as 'The Hymn to Mercury', the book argues that Shelley's recourse to Greek literature should be understood as creating a mode of experience through which his readers might reimagine their relationship with the ancient past. Literary form, both in the minutiae of diction, phrase, and line, and in larger registers such as the choice of metre and rhyme scheme, is crucial to this process. The generically varied texts which this book examines—including letters and short stories as well as poems—are grounded in a philology that is radical in regard to the political ends towards which it is directed, in promulgating new ways of reading ancient texts, and in reconceiving what reading itself might consist of.