This volume is a wide-ranging, sensitive study of Percy Bysshe Shelley's response to previous writers and cultural influences, and of his influence on later nineteenth-century writers.

Michael O'Neill was Professor of English at Durham University. He was Head of Department for two three-year periods and a Director of the University's Institute of Advanced Study. His research was concentrated on questions of literary achievement and on literary dialogue and influence. He published widely on Romantic poetry, especially Percy Bysshe Shelley, and on an array of Victorian and twentieth- and twenty-first century poets. He co-founded and co-edited Poetry Durham from 1982 to 1994. He received many awards for his criticism and poetry, including Distinguished Scholar Award from the Keats-Shelley Association of America for 2019.

• Introduction


• 1: Emulating Plato: Shelley as Translator and Prose Poet


• 2: 'The Right Scale of that Balance': Shelley, Spenser, Milton


• 3: 'A Double Face of False and True': Poetry and Religion in Shelley


• 4: Shelley, Lamb, Hazlitt, and the Revolutionary Imagination


• 5: 'A Kind of an Excuse': Shelley and Wordsworth Revisited


• 6: The Gleam of Those Words': Shelley and Coleridge


• 7: Shelley and Southey Reconsidered


• 8: 'The Fixed and the Fluid': Identity in Shelley and Byron


• 9: Narrative and Play: Shelley's The Witch of Atlas and Byron's Beppo


• 10: 'The End and Aim of Poesy': Shelley and Keats in Dialogue


• 11: Turning to Dante: Shelley's Adonais Reconsidered


• 12: 'The Inmost Spirit of Light': Shelley and Turner


• 13: Shelley, Beddoes, Death, and Reputation


• 14: 'Materials for Imagination': Shelleyan Traces in Felicia Hemans's Later Poetry


• 15: 'Beautiful but Ideal': Intertextual Relations between Percy Bysshe Shelley and Letitia Elizabeth Landon


• 16: The Wheels of Being: Shelley and Tennyson


• 17: 'Stars Caught in My Branches': Shelley and Swinburne


• Coda: A. C. Bradley's Views of Shelley


• Bibliography