This anthology brings together for the first time Shelley's almost unknown prose writings on the subject of love. Drawn from his notebooks, his essays, his reviews, his fictional fragments, his translations, and his continuous stream of private philosophical speculations, it does not merely give a Romantic poet's view of romantic passion, but treats of love at large, in all its forms and manifestations: childhood and parental; adolescent and idealized; heterosexual and homosexual; domestic and poetic; communal and monogamous; pagan and Christian; earthly and ideal. It selects three extracts from the lesser-read longer poems, which serve to crystallize his attitudes to love at three critical moments in his personal life: from Alastor (1816), from Julian and Maddalo (1818), and from his verse autobiography, Epipsychidion (1821 )"--Preface.