SOURCE: "Shelley," in The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 100, No. 3, September, 1907, pp. 347–56.

Symons was a critic, poet, dramatist, short story writer, and editor who first gained notoriety in the 1890s as an English decadent. Eventually, he established himself as one of the most important critics of the modern era. Symons provided his English contemporaries with an appropriate vocabulary with which to define the aesthetic of symbolism in his book The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899); furthermore, he laid the foundation for much of modern poetic theory by discerning the importance of the symbol as a vehicle by which a "hitherto unknown reality was suddenly revealed. " In the following essay, Symons provides an overview of the philosophy behind Shelley's verse.

"I have the vanity to write only for poetical minds," Shelley said to Trelawny, "and must be satisfied with few readers." "I am, and I desire to be, nothing," he wrote to...