_ author: percy bysshe shelley more titles by shelley what is love? ask him who lives, what is life? ask him who adores, what is god? i know not the internal constitution of other men, nor even thine, whom i now address. I see that in some external attributes they resemble me, but when, misled by that appearance, i have thought to appeal to something in common, and unburthen my inmost soul to them, i have found my language misunderstood, like one in a distant and savage land. The more opportunities they have afforded me for experience, the wider has appeared the interval between us, and to a greater distance have the points of sympathy been withdrawn. With a spirit ill fitted to sustain such proof, trembling and feeble through its tenderness, i have everywhere sought sympathy and have found only repulse and disappointment. 813 845 10.1353/elh.2003.0028 in lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: there are very few writers who combat both ideological repression and libidinal repression. In 1828 percy shelley's essay on love 1818 composed in the same year that his wife, mary shelley, published frankenstein appeared in the popular poetic giftbook of the day, the keepsake for 1829. These annuals, consumed largely by middle class women, contained verse and prose intended to illustrate the elegantly engraved plates often portraits of fashionable, aristocratic women that served as the main attraction to the volumes.

In addition to the illustrations, patrons were wooed by the high quality of paper, bindings, cover, and dedication plates, all of which were designed as ornate and decorative hooks to lure subscribers. On top of these attractions, the giftbooks featured aristocratic editors like lady blessington and celebrity authors like william wordsworth, samuel taylor coleridge, robert southey, thomas moore, percy shelley, mary shelley, and letitia landon. As peter manning notes, such collections, especially after the elegant innovations of the keepsake. Clearly functioned first and foremost as status denoting gifts rather than as books one actually read. Or more accurately, what was read were first and foremost the portraits, subscribers, and contributors in other words, the signs of status with which those who wished to be in the know needed to be familiar. In percy shelley's case, status was also very much in play for the celebrity contributor himself, since this essay and the poems that appear in the annual are all posthumous pieces shelley died in 1822 provided by his widow.

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Percy and mary shelley thus collaborate here, as they do elsewhere, to establish the authorial persona of the in famous poet, and, in particular, to revise it as one thoroughly suffused in the refined sentiment manufactured by and for a deeply feeling sentimental female audience of giftbook patrons. While this is in part a clear attempt to rehabilitate the current reputation of the bad boy poet, as well as a necessary economic supplement for mary shelley, it does not in feeding both of these needs simply play to the current tastes of the market of the 1820s. In fact, mary shelley's strategic contextualizing of her late husband's work regardless of what his own intentions for these pieces might have been is less a debasement of his genius, as critics of an earlier era argued, than it is consummately true to its spirit.

What percy shelley's essay makes clear, especially to its contemporary audience, is that his true heart faith, as the athenaeum response calls it, is indebted to his predecessor writers of sensibility, and particularly to laurence sterne. The central concern of percy shelley's on love is the exploration of the nature of love, executed, as one would expect, quite poetically. Shelley begins by addressing the question what is love? as fundamentally unanswerable, beyond the powers of language, and perhaps even of clear conception.

Interestingly, as the essay proceeds we come to see that these are not merely questions analogously difficult or impossible to answer, but analogous in importance as well. Ultimately, shelley's piece suggests that they may be the same question articulated in three different ways, since the essence of love, and life, and god are essentially the same. Given the way in which he casts this exploration, we can also say that in the end this worldly trinity is synonymous with what eighteenth century writers called sensibility, drawn in part from the figure of the sensorium that writers like sterne invoked by bringing heaven down to earth, and in the conflation of the two, associating both with the eternal fountain of our feelings and the source of the divinity which stirs within.

Which also feeds the musings of walter shandy in sterne's earlier life and opinions of tristram shandy. The figure of the sensorium is formulated most famously at this time in isaac newton's opticks. Percy bysshe shelley was born at field place, sussex, in 1792, the son of a well to do landowner. There he was bullied and often lonely, but there too he acquired an interest in science, especially astronomy and chemistry, and became an avid reader of juvenile thrillers filled with horrors of various kinds. Shelley reacted to the bullying he was subjected to with violent anger and a determination to devote himself to opposing every form of tyranny. In 1804, shelley entered eton college, where he encountered more of the same bullying he had been subjected to at syon house.

His outbursts of rage and his inability to fight encouraged the other boys to provoke him. However, he made a number of friends at eton and embarked on his literary career. In the same year, with his sister, he coauthored a volume of poems, most of them in the gothic tradition, entitled original poetry by victor shelley and cazire elizabeth shelley. A short volume of poems, posthumous fragments of margaret nicholson, purporting to be edited by a john fitz victor, was also published by shelley in 1810. On march 25, 1811, he was summoned to appear before the master of university college and, when he refused to admit or deny his authorship of the pamphlet, he was immediately expelled. Shortly after his expulsion, he eloped to scotland with harriet westbrook, a schoolgirl companion of his sister, hellen.