The Mask of Anarchy

Shelley’s fame rests largely upon his poetry, and his contribution to the English poetic canon, but he was also a polemicist and radical activist in the struggles for equality and social justice: a revolutionary writer who contributed to radical literature (as poet, playwright and political pamphleteer) an alternative vision of equality and liberation that prefigured the socialist literature – in Utopian, communist and other varieties - which emerged not long after his death.