Do the early efforts of a great writer have the glimmerings of greatness? This week we have a test case. A long-lost poem published by Percy Bysshe Shelley when an 18-year-old student at Oxford has just been acquired by the Bodleian Library.

Shelley’s Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things, written in 1811, was designed to nettle his elders and betters. A verse denunciation of oppression in the colonies and corruption at home, it provocatively declared, on its title page, that proceeds from its sale were “For assisting to maintain in prison Mr Peter Finnerty, Imprisoned for a Libel”. Finnerty, a radical Irish journalist, had been imprisoned for seditious libel for accusing the politician Lord Castlereagh of mistreating United Irish prisoners.

Scholars have always known about the Essay, but apparently not a single copy had survived. Perhaps the authorities took measure to destroy all copies; they tried to do this with The Necessity of Atheism, the pamphlet Shelley published a few months later that led to him being expelled from the university. Yet one copy, given by Shelley to a cousin, did survive, turning up unexpectedly nine years ago. An anonymous donor has given it to the Bodleian and it is now available, via the library’s website, to any reader.

Shelley aficionados have proclaimed its relevance to our own ‘existing state of things’, but in truth it is a document of its times. Its title echoes the title of William Godwin’s novel Things As They Are and its creed is taken from the political philosophy of the man who was to become his father-in-law. (Godwin’s daughter was the future Mary Shelley.)

‘What Shelley’s poem mostly offers is outrage’ Photograph: Oxford University

In its preface the author rejects what we might call direct action in favour of “gradual yet decided intellectual exertions”. Rational arguments “must diffuse light, as human eyes are capable of bearing it”. Godwin was a necessitarian, believing that a just society would inevitably come through the rational triumph of his ideas.

What Shelley’s poem mostly offers is outrage. It has an epigraph from the opening of Juvenal’s satires: Nunquam ne reponam / Vexatus toties? It is the satirist’s indignant rhetorical question: “Am I, who have been outraged so often, never to respond?” Unfortunately the essay has none of Juvenal’s sharply particular portraits of vice and folly. Instead it indulges a Shelleyan weakness for personified abstractions (present even in some of his mature poetry). “Fell Ambition o’er the wasted plain / Triumphant guide his car”. Here are War and Glory and Expiring Freedom.

There were rogues and oppressors enough among the ruling classes of Regency Britain, but they easily remain unseen behind the lofty abstractions of this poem. There is nothing like the brilliant crudeness of The Masque of Anarchy, almost a decade later: “I met murder on the way, / He had a mask like Castlereagh”.

You can infer what angered the young Shelley: imperialism, poverty, the actions of Napoleon (“May that destruction, which ‘tis thine to spread / Descend with ten-fold fury on thy head”). On BBC Radio 4’s Today programme Vanessa Redgrave read with husky solemnity the lines in which the poet demands, “Let Reason mount the Despot’s mouldering throne / And bid an injured nation cease to moan”, but could not make it sound like good poetry.

Formally it gives little hint of what is to come. Shelley became a virtuoso of different patterns of rhyme and metre, but the Essay, like many a poetical “essay” of the eighteenth century, is written in the pentameter rhyming couplets perfected by Alexander Pope. Nothing as good as Pope here, just the odd good phrase: the “cold advisers of yet colder kings”, whom Shelley berates; the way Pitt, the prime minister, “lends to each smooth rogue a courtier’s smile”.

The person at the centre of Shelley’s poem is the reforming MP Sir Francis Burdett, who had begun a public appeal for funds to support Finnerty: “the pen of fame / On every heart has written BURDETT’S name”.

The young Shelley, it has to be said, is quite as verbose in praise as he is elsewhere in condemnation. Burdett was certainly a man of principle, but here he becomes a spirit from some other world. “Thou taintless emanation from the sky! / Thou purest spark of fires which never die!” No shortage of exclamation marks in this poem.

Richard Ovenden from the Bodleian Library suggests that lines from Shelley’s poem readily applied to the sufferings of today’s desperate refugees from Syria. But then the indignation of Shelley’s verses is so unspecific and all-embracing that it fits any number of calamities.

This righteous protest at “the Existing State of Things” is as sweeping as many a clever teenager’s rebellious fury. As Shelley exclaims in the Essay, “Oppression’s venal minions! hence, avaunt!” Who could not agree?