The book is an authoritative and up-to-date collection of original essays on one of the greatest of all English poets, Percy Bysshe Shelley. It covers a wide range of topics, exploring Shelley's life and work from various angles.

Winners of an Honorable Mention from the Modern Language Association's Prize for a Distinguished Scholarly Edition Writing to his publisher in 1813, Shelley expressed the hope that two of his major works "should form one volume"; nearly two centuries later, the second volume of the Johns Hopkins edition of The Complete Poetry fulfills that wish for the first time. This volume collects two important pieces: Queen Mab and The Esdaile Notebook. Privately issued in 1813, Queen Mab was perhaps Shelley's most intellectually ambitious work, articulating his views of science, politics, history, religion, society, and individual human relations. Subtitled A Philosophical Poem: With Notes, it became his most influential—and pirated—poem during much of the nineteenth century, a favorite among reformers and radicals. The Esdaile Notebook, a cycle of fifty-eight early poems, exhibits an astonishing range of verse forms. Unpublished until 1964, this sequence is vital in understanding how the poet mastered his craft. As in the acclaimed first volume, these works have been critically edited by Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat. The poems are presented as Shelley intended, with textual variants included in footnotes. Following the poems are extensive discussions of the circumstances of their composition and the influences they reflect; their publication or circulation by other means; their reception at the time of publication and in the decades since; their re-publication, both authorized and unauthorized; and their place in Shelley's intellectual and aesthetic development.

This is a new release of the original 1932 edition.

Winner of the 2013 Richard J. Finneran Award, Society for Textual ScholarshipOutstanding Academic Title, Choice "His name is Percy Bysshe Shelley, and he is the author of a poetical work entitled Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude.” With these words, the radical journalist and poet Leigh Hunt announced his discovery in 1816 of an extraordinary talent within “a new school of poetry rising of late.” The third volume of the acclaimed edition of The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley includes Alastor, one of Shelley’s first major works, and all the poems that Shelley completed, for either private circulation or publication, during the turbulent years from 1814 to March 1818: Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, Mont Blanc, Laon and Cythna, as well as shorter pieces, such as his most famous sonnet, Ozymandias. It was during these years that Shelley, already an accomplished and practiced poet with three volumes of published verse, authored two major volumes, earned international recognition, and became part of the circle that was later called the Younger Romantics. As with previous volumes, extensive discussions of the poems’ composition, influences, publication, circulation, reception, and critical history accompany detailed records of textual variants for each work. Among the appendixes are Mary W. Shelley’s 1839 notes on the poems for these years, a table of the forty-two revisions made to Laon and Cythna for its reissue as The Revolt of Islam, and Shelley’s errata list for the same. It is in the works included in this volume that the recognizable and characteristic voice of Shelley emerges—unmistakable, consistent, and vital.

A major new anthology of Percy Bysshe Shelley's work, edited by Jack Donovan and Cian Duffy. 'My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!' Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the leading English Romantics and is critically regarded among the finest lyric poets in the English language. His major works include the long visionary poems 'Prometheus Unbound' and 'Adonais', an elegy on the death of John Keats. His shorter, classic verses include 'To a Skylark', 'Mont Blanc' and 'Ode to the West Wind'. This important new edition collects his best poetry and prose, revealing how his writings weave together the political, personal, visionary and idealistic. This Penguin Classics edition includes a fascinating introduction, notes and other materials by leading Shelley scholars, Jack Donovan and Cian Duffy.