Consider these items. A rich and gifted young man is obsessed with revolutionary idealism. He attends prestigious schools and the most prestigious university, but is expelled from the latter due to his outspoken and outspoken opinions, opinions that he chose to publish in pamphlets. He is disowned by his family, runs away with his girlfriend, gets into drugs and spends his time writing poetry that no one else claims to understand. He gets bored with her wife, has an affair with a teenage girl, and goes on a trip with her, seemingly untroubled by leaving her wife and children to her fate. Shortly after, his estranged wife commits suicide. He takes more drugs, regularly, hangs out on his trips with his new wife, hangs out with a large crowd of fellow travelers, goes against authority, and does stupid things.

He continues to write, but usually has to publish his work on his own, because others still find it baffling. He seems to be obsessed with a particular hobby, a practice that, for him, is positively dangerous and he eventually dies on a escapade in which he engages in this risky activity, has an accident and dies, very young. His friends retrieve his body and ritually burn it, but his heart appears to survive the roast and is recovered.

This is not a 1960s hippie, nor the spoiled spoiled son of a millionaire millionaire. This is Percy Bysshe Shelly, the English poet, in the first two decades of the 19th century. And reading JA Symond’s 1878 biography, with its copious quotations from the Romantic poet’s work, we see a portrait of the artist when he was young. He stayed forever young because he died long before he was old. But he was also young because he never seemed to shake the infant’s need for attention, for the kind of special treatment that required others to accommodate to his whims while he himself did not seem to realize that others might need some attention. the same. He was the artist because his whole life seems to have been a quest to express a platonic essence of life and experience, a life he seemed to reject, or at least take for granted, an experience he clouded with narcotics.

A 21st-century visit to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s biography might persuade the reader to dismiss the whole thing as mere banter from a spoiled, headstrong sick kid who was also a rich kid. But this 19th-century biography offers a more contemporary view of this great life than one obscured by more recent assumptions or interpretations about the individual and his time. It allows us to see Shelley’s undoubted genius more in the context of how he was received in his own time, and while it may not be the last word on the great poet, it can offer interesting and compelling insights.

What is doubly interesting about this work is that its author, John Addington Symonds, was a rebel in his time, cut off from society because of his homosexuality. And strangely, the author was buried in Rome, not far from the tomb where Shelley’s ashes were buried. Poetry, it seems, is alive and well.