I FIRST came across the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley in a second-hand Penguin edition that I purchased from a stall in Wandsworth. I was not terribly impressed. In the introduction, the editor, Isobel Quigley informed us that: “No poet better repays cutting; no great poet was ever less worth reading in his entirety.”
Therefore, I assumed that the 70 odd poems and extracts that make up the book must be the best of Shelley and quickly put it aside after a cursory read. The angelic Shelley with his concerns for clouds and skylarks was not for me. Then I read Paul Foot’s Red Shelley, and I was entranced by the story he had to tell.
In this powerful book Foot attempts to “free Shelley from the academic prison in which he has been trapped” by the likes of Isobel Quigley, for over 100 years. He opened my eyes to the real Shelley – the revolutionary, the republican and the feminist. He restored to Shelley the ideas without which his poetry loses so much of its magic, music and its meaning.
When he was 19, Shelley wrote Queen Mab, the most revolutionary of his longer poems. Written in 1812, at the height of the Napoleonic wars, his anger at injustice, oppression and in particular the military is everywhere in this poem. Almost 200 years later it retains all it’s freshness and excitement and speaks to today if we care to listen:

War is the statesman’s game, the priest’s delight,
The lawyer’s jest, the hired assassin’s trade.
In 1819, when Shelly was living in Italy, news came of an attack by the yeomanry on a demonstration by trade unionists in Saint Peter’s field in Manchester – the Peterloo Massacre. Eleven people were killed, and more than 400 injured. His outrage at this slaughter spurred him into the most creative periods of his life – “a great burst of fury in poetry and prose, against one of Britain’s most repressive Tory governments”.
Over the next six months he wrote some of his greatest work: Ode to the West Wind, Song to the Men of England, Ode to Liberty, and The Masque of Anarchy, rightly described as “the greatest poem of political protest ever written in the English language”. It describes a dreadful pageant in which the government ministers, Castlereagh, Eldon and Sidmouth, dressed respectively as Murder, Fraud and Hypocrisy, ride by, slaughtering “the adoring multitude” as they go.

I met Murder on the way,
He had a mask like Castlereagh – 
Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
Seven blood-hounds followed him:

All were fat; and well they might
Be in admirable plight,
For one by one, and two by two,
He tossed them human hearts to chew
Which from his wide cloak he drew.

One of the great myths concocted by the Shelley-lovers of the past was that Shelley was only concerned with love. Of course he wrote great love poetry.
But for Shelley, love was bound up with the battle for women’s rights. In all his great radical poems the revolutionary leaders are women. All are champions for the rights of their sex:

Can man be free if
woman be a slave?
Chain one who lives, and breathes this boundless air
To the corruption of a closed grave?

Almost single-handedly Paul Foot has introduced a new generation to Shelley’s poetry and vision. He writes with eloquence and passion and a real love for his subject. Here was the real Shelley, brought to life before our very eyes. He always finished these meetings by appealing to the audience to make sure that their children read Shelley, even if they have to bribe them to do so. All I can do is repeat that plea.
Don’t bother with the Penguin edition of Shelley, buy a copy of Red Shelley and a decent edition of the poems and read two of the finest writers in the English language.

• Paul Foot, who died last July, was a tireless campaigner against injustice and a writer and speaker of extraordinary ability. The many awards he received for his column in The Daily Mirror, The Guardian and Private Eye honoured his ability as a journalist. His many books include The Vote: How it was Won and how it was Undermined, published shortly after his death, which I am sure, will stand alongside Red Shelley as a lasting memorial to his life and work.

• Paul O’Brien is a former lecturer in history at Notre Dame University in Dublin.