The Masque of Anarchy

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The Masque of Anarchy (or The Mask of Anarchy) is a British political poem written in 1819 by Percy Bysshe Shelley following the Peterloo Massacre of that year. In his call for freedom, it is perhaps the first modern statement of the principle of nonviolent resistance. The poem was not published during Shelley's lifetime and did not appear in print until 1832, when published by Edward Moxon in London with a preface by Leigh Hunt. Shelley had sent the manuscript in 1819 for publication in The Examiner. Hunt withheld it from publication because he "thought that the public at large had not become sufficiently discerning to do justice to the sincerity and kind-heartedness of the spirit that walked in this flaming robe of verse". The epigraph on the cover of the first edition is from Shelley's The Revolt of Islam (1818): "Hope is strong; Justice and Truth their winged child have found." Shelley wrote the poem while living in Italy in conjunction with other similar political works such as "England...

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