ABSTRACT
Given the good company that it keeps within these covers and the readers that it will likely encounter, this paper may be characterized as one knight’s tale about his quest for our Holy Grail – the true meaning of the life, thought and art of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Because it telescopes into 7,500 words almost fifty years of ‘adventures’ (the kind experienced only in research libraries and scholarly home libraries), it will be relatively abstract. But it may prove helpful to others engaged in similar searches, if only to caution them against the sin of hubris that causes those of us in humanistic studies to think, each time we learn something new, that we have found the single answer, the total explanation, the magic formula revealing all that anyone wants to know about the noble dead.
