Abstract
Shelley’s lost Poetical Essay (1811), now that it can be read at last, justifies hopes that it would prove an important addition to the canon. Although not a masterpiece, in content and style it shows a rapid advance over the earlier ‘Ambition, power, and avarice’ in Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson (1810), and is the bridge between Shelley’s early poetry and Queen Mab. In addition to the influence of Godwin, Erasmus Darwin, and Southey, that of Byron’s English Bards and Scotch Reviewers may be seen. Essay hovers between the satiric and the visionary, between provocation and circumspection. Shelley’s sense of the radical poet’s mission emerges as he attacks, with varying degrees of explicitness, Christianity, the monarchy, imperialism, and the Peninsula War.
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