Percy Bysshe Shelley Audio Books

The Masque of Anarchy was Shelley's response to the Peterloo massacre at St Peter's Fields, Manchester, where 18 died and hundreds were injured, after Hussars charged into a rally for parliamentary reform. Written in Italy in 1819, the poem was not published until 1832, ten years after Shelley's death.

Here is the quintessence of romance that spans not only the ages but the full range of passionate expression of love in all of its forms and stages. Authors include John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, George Gordon Byron, Baron Byron, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Blake.

Idealist, atheist, outcast, political radical and, of course, poet - Percy Bysshe Shelley was, in many ways, the epitome of the Romantic artist. His poetry was an outlet for his passionately held and highly unpopular beliefs, beliefs which resulted in social exclusion, exile, and possibly even his premature death at the age of 29.

The English Romantic Period in literature featured a towering group of excellent poets: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats. If we add in forerunners Burns and Blake, we have perhaps an unmatchable collection of writers for any era.

From the asthmatic urgency of its opening abduction scene to the Satanic defiance of the villain's departure "with a wild convulsive laugh of exulting revenge", this first of Shelley's Gothic novelettes recycles much sensational boyhood reading and also points to some of his more mature concerns.