Percy Shelley, the most neglected of all the great Romantic poets, was born in Sussex in 1792 and died in Tuscany in 1822, his brief life full of passionate love affairs, reckless excursions and astonishing feats of intellect and imagination. Richard Holmes's biography offers a serious and critical reappraisal of Shelley as a man and a writer. All his prose and poetry is carefully re-examined, his sense of spiritual and geographical isolation brilliantly described and a detailed portrait of his macabre imaginative life slowly assembled.Shelley's intense friendships with some of the most remarkable figures of his age fill Holmes's pages with a vivid panorama of revolutionary idealism and vigour - an excitement shadowed by Shelley's torturous romantic liaisons, complications that affected both the peculiar tenor of his daily life and the conception of his poetry. Read Less