O May I Join the Choir Invisible! and Other Favorite Poems
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Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was an English Romantic poet. Born into a prominent political family, Shelley enjoyed a quiet and happy childhood in West Sussex, developing a passion for nature and literature at a young age. He struggled in school, however, and was known by his colleagues at Eton College and University College, Oxford as an outsider and eccentric who spent more time acquainting himself with radical politics and the occult than with the requirements of academia. During his time at Oxford, he began his literary career in earnest, publishing Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire (1810) and St. Irvine; or, The Rosicrucian: A Romance (1811) In 1811, he married Harriet Westbrook, with whom he lived an itinerant lifestyle while pursuing affairs with other women. Through the poet Robert Southey, he fell under the influence of political philosopher William Godwin, whose daughter Mary soon fell in love with the precocious young poet. In the summer of 1814, Shelley eloped to France with Mary and her stepsister Claire Claremont, travelling to Holland, Germany, and Switzerland before returning to England in the fall. Desperately broke, Shelley struggled to provide for Mary through several pregnancies while balancing his financial obligations to Godwin, Harriet, and his own father. In 1816, Percy and Mary accepted an invitation to join Claremont and Lord Byron in Europe, spending a summer in Switzerland at a house on Lake Geneva. In 1818, following several years of unhappy life in England, the Shelleys—now married—moved to Italy, where Percy worked on The Masque of Anarchy (1819), Prometheus Unbound (1820), and Adonais (1821), now considered some of his most important works. In July of 1822, Shelley set sail on the Don Juan and was lost in a storm only hours later. His death at the age of 29 was met with despair and contempt throughout England and Europe, and he is now considered a leading poet and radical thinker of the Romantic era.
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O May I Join the Choir Invisible! and Other Favorite Poems - Percy Bysshe Shelley
O May I Join the Choir Invisible!, by George Eliot
The Project Gutenberg eBook, O May I Join the Choir Invisible!, by George
Eliot
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
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Title: O May I Join the Choir Invisible!
and Other Favorite Poems
Author: George Eliot
Release Date: March 4, 2007 [eBook #20742]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK O MAY I JOIN THE CHOIR INVISIBLE!***
Transcribed from the 1884 D. Lothrop and Company edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org
O MAY I JOIN
THE CHOIR INVISIBLE!
by
GEORGE ELIOT
and other favorite poems
ILLUSTRATED
BOSTON
D. LOTHROP AND COMPANY
franklin and hawley streets
Copyright by
D. Lothrop and Company
1884
O MAY I JOIN THE CHOIR INVISIBLE!
O may I join the choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence; live
In pulses stirred to generosity,
In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn
Of miserable aims that end with self,
In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars,
And with their mild persistence urge men’s minds
To vaster issues.
So to live is heaven:
To make undying music in the world,
Breathing a beauteous order that controls
With growing sway the growing life of man.
So we inherit that sweet purity
For which we