Harps, Heroes and Yelling Vampires: The 1810 Poetry Collections

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s career as a published poet began in 1810 with two pseudonymous collections, the first of which has been described as ‘a practical joke from beginning to end’ and the second as ‘a defiant undergraduate prank’. Original Poetry; by Victor and Cazire, a slim quarto published in September 1810 by the London firm of John Joseph Stockdale, was a joint production with Shelley’s sister Elizabeth. Most of the other songs in Original Poetry have a more obviously personal content, and editors and commentators have generally offered biographical readings, connecting the poems to Shelley’s relationship with Harriet Grove. The poem’s metre and rhyme scheme, its plaintive tone, the desolate landscape with ruined buildings, the use of the mythological name ‘Erin’, the symbol of the harp, the pledge that the Irish cause must never be forgotten, even the mode of address are all modelled directly on Moore’s Irish Melodies.