The introduction to The Politics of Shelley: History, Theory, Form begins by returning to a 2001 volume in the Romantic Circles Praxis Series that addressed Shelley's politics. Homing in on the complexity of the possibility of a poem intervening in its immediate political context, the introduction frames the volume as sustaining the necessity of seeing through and beyond the antinomy of commitment and autonomy by rereading and reimagining the political in Shelley’s writings and his legacy.