ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book seeks to establish the biographical, cultural, and theoretical context for Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ideas on music. It considers Shelley’s use of figurative language and his prosody in two of his longer poems, specifically Alastor and Prometheus Unbound. The book explores the presence of music in Shelley’s earlier works through a close reading of Alastor. It looks at the question of form in the context of Shelley’s shorter lyrics in order to examine the lyric as a type of musico-poetic composition, which in Shelley’s poetry found form not only as domestic love poems, but also as radically political songs. The book explains the bond between music and poetry with regard to matters of form in Shelley’s poetry, specifically with relation to dramatic and lyrical form.
