ABSTRACT
One of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s other voices has exercised its force in a diversity of twentieth-century contexts: for instance, and in strikingly different circumstances, the German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht and the Irish poet Thomas Kinsella have both been indebted to the example of ‘The Mask of Anarchy’. Ironically ‘The Triumph’ is intricately tied to the copious and diverse volume of work that Shelley produced before it – in short to the epic scope of his work and ideas – and may best be understood in relation to it. A critical industry mainly in academic circles tends to focus on a narrow range of poems, thus excluding the larger and extraordinarily diverse corpus. Parts of Shelley’s little-read epic poem Laon and Cythna are taken seriously and examined in the context of Rousseau and Godwin, both of whom the young Shelley had absorbed in his reading.
