Percy Bysshe Shelley Quotes
One word is too often profaned For me to profane it, One feeling too falsely disdain'd For thee to disdain it. One hope too like dispair For prudence to smother, I can give not what men call love: But wilt thou accept not The worship the heart lifts above And heaven rejects not: The desire of the moth for the star, The devotion of something afar From the sphere of our sorrow?
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. "To —." Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley, edited by Mary Shelley, John and Henry L. Hunt, 1824, p. 211.
Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the major English Romantic poets. American literary critic Harold Bloom describes him as "a superb craftsman, a lyric poet without rival, and surely one of the most advanced sceptical intellects ever to write a poem." A radical in his poetry as well as in his political and social views, Shelley did not achieve fame during his lifetime, but recognition of his achievements in poetry grew steadily following his death and he became an important influence on subsequent generations of poets including Browning, Swinburne, Hardy and Yeats.
