PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY: SELECTED POEMS A selection of the odes, hymns and paeans of England"s breathless, angelic, anarchic poet. Famous poems, such as "Ode to the West Wind" and "The Cloud", are set beside extracts from Prometheus Unbound and Epipsychidion. Percy Shelley is one of the "major" British poets, seen by many people as the breathless, hyperlyrical, angelic yet anarchic poet of the Romantic era, out-doing Lord Byron and John Keats in terms of sheer brilliance. His personality, as with Keats and Byron, is a crucial component in the Shelley legend. For Shelley has a cult built up around him, and his life is so much more colourful than, say, Thomas Hardy"s or Philip Larkin"s lives. For Shelley, as for so many other Romantic poets, poetry expands life, renews and replenishes life. In "A Defence of Poetry". Shelley wrote: "Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of...