Alastor, Percy Bysshe Shelley
Alastor, Percy Bysshe Shelley
List: $7.99 | Sale: $5.60
Club: $3.99

Alastor
Or the Spirit of Solitude And Other Poems

Author: Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, Bertram Dobell

Narrator: Denis Daly

Unabridged: 1 hr 37 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 07/05/2021


Synopsis

Alastor

Or the Spirit of Solitude

And Other Poems

By Percy Bysshe Shelley

Narrated by Denis Daly

This meditation on artistic creativity was written during the latter months of 1815, during a sojourn on the border of Windsor Forest. Critics have concurred in the opinion that the anonymous hero of the poem is Shelley himself, who feared that he too would become an "inheritor of unfulfilled renown." Today, the poem is considered to be the first major work of Shelley's maturity.

Appended to the collection were a number of shorter pieces:

1) To Coleridge

2) Stanzas — April 1814

3) Mutability

4) The pale, the cold, and the moony smile

5) A Summer-evening Church-yard

6) To Wordsworth

7) Feelings of a Republican on the Fall of Bonaparte

8) Superstition

9) Sonnet from the Italian of Dante

10) Translated from the Greek of Moschus

11) The Daemon of the World

The final poem is a reworking of the first two cantos of a much larger work, Queen Mab, which was first published in 1813.

Production copyright 2021 Voices of Today

Reviews

Goodreads review by Sean Barrs on March 21, 2017

Read these lines then tell me that I actually need to write a review to go alongside this rating! "A vision on his sleep There came, a dream of hopes that never yet Had flushed his cheek. He dreamed a veilèd maid Sate near him, talking in low solemn tones. Her voice was like the voice of his own soul Hea......more

Goodreads review by Seamaiden on November 08, 2015

I can't say I understood much about it, but I can recognize the art behind it. I am not a huge fan of poetry, and Shelley's poetry is too complicated, but one can see the complicated notions of the poet's mind in this poem.......more

Goodreads review by kaleigh on February 08, 2025

percy shelley reminds me why I hate polyamorous people......more

Goodreads review by Steve on September 26, 2022

Written in the closing months of 1815 and first published in 1816, this poem of a little more than seven hundred lines was Shelley’s first major creative work after the earlier Queen Mab. By then he had been expelled from Oxford, broken irretrievably with his family, eloped and married, had two chil......more

Goodreads review by Sarah on December 06, 2015

"There was a poet whose untimely tomb No human hands with pious reverence reared, But the charmed eddies of the autumnal winds Built o'er his mouldering bones a pyramid Of mouldering leaves in the waste wilderness:-- A lovely youth, -- no mourning maiden decked With weeping flowers, or votive cypress w......more