Shelley's description of Roman statuary echoes the temper of his life, which was no less restless, no less impelled towards an ideal resting place, no less resistant to being sculpted into a single gesture or pose. As such, his life offers a pressing instance of the general problem of biography: how to capture a life that is lived not simply on a timeline but down through layers of being and action that are psychic, cultural, political, philosophical, and at times contradictory? As a poet, essayist, and celebrity whose Romantic notoriety is outdistanced only by Byron's, Shelley lived a life that was passionate, restless, and brief. He also left behind a remarkable body of poetry and prose. Even Wordsworth, who was no friend to Shelley's radical politics, praised Shelley as 'one of the best artists of us all . . . in workmanship of style' (W II.637). His prose is by turns astutely political and philosophically brilliant. The chronology presented at the beginning of this volume is an anchor but not an adequate measure of a life that was, as one of Shelley's recent biographers puts it, better characterized as 'a manuscript greatly over-scored and corrected than [as] . . . a clock or a calendar'.