Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was one of the major Romantic poets, and wrote what is critically recognised as some of the finest lyric poetry in the English language. This is the first volume of the five-volume The Poems of Shelley, which presents all of Shelley’s poems in chronological order and with full annotation. Date and circumstances of composition are provided for each poem and all manuscript and printed sources relevant to establishing an authoritative text are freshly examined and assessed. Headnotes and footnotes supply the personal, literary, historical and scientific information necessary to an informed reading of Shelley’s varied and allusive verse. The present volume includes the 'Esdaile' poems, which only entered the public domain in the 1950s, printed in chronological order and integrated with the rest of Shelley's early output, and Queen Mab, the first of Shelley’s major poems, together with its extensive prose notes. The seminal Alastor volume is placed in the detailed context of Shelley’s overall poetic development. The ‘Scrope Davies’ notebook, only discovered in 1976, furnishes two otherwise unknown sonnets as well as alternative versions of ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ and ‘Mont Blanc’, which significantly influence our understanding of these important poems. This first volume contains new datings, and makes numerous corrections to long-established errors and misunderstandings in the transmission of Shelley's work. Its annotations and headnotes provide new perspectives on Shelley's literary, philosophical and political development The volumes of The Poems of Shelley form the most comprehensive edition of Shelley's poetry available to students and scholars.

This edition contains all Shelley's poetry, from his juvenilia to his great works such as "The Revolt of Islam" and "Ode to the West Wind", and his only completed verse drama "The Cenci", a melodramatic Venetian tale of incest, murder and revenge.

This new volume of JHU Press's landmark Shelley edition contains posthumous poems edited from original manuscripts. "The world will surely one day feel what it has lost," wrote Mary Shelley after Percy Bysshe Shelley's premature death in July 1822. Determined to hasten that day, she recovered his unpublished and uncollected poems and sifted through his surviving notebooks and papers. In Genoa during the winter of 1822–23, she painstakingly transcribed poetry "interlined and broken into fragments, so that the sense could only be deciphered and joined by guesses." Blasphemy and sedition laws prevented her from including her husband's most outspoken radical works, but the resulting volume, Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1824), was a magnificent display of Shelley's versatility and craftsmanship between 1816 and 1822. Few such volumes have made more difference to an author's reputation. The seventh volume of the acclaimed Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley extracts from Posthumous Poems those original poems and fragments Mary Shelley edited. The collection opens with Shelley's enigmatic dream vision The Triumph of Life, the last major poem he began—and, in the opinion of T. S. Eliot, the finest thing he ever wrote. There follow some of the most famous and beautiful of Shelley's short lyrics, narrative fragments, two unfinished plays, and other previously unreleased pieces. Upholding the standards of accuracy and comprehensiveness set by previous volumes, every item in Volume 7 has been newly edited from the original manuscripts, in some cases superseding texts that have stood since 1870. Extensive appendixes contain Mary Shelley's preface to Posthumous Poems, Shelley's source for "Ginevra," and preparatory material for his play Charles the First. Wide-ranging discussions of the poems' composition, influences, publication, circulation, reception, and critical history accompany detailed records of textual variants for each work. The editorial overview and commentaries offer insights into Mary Shelley's editorial strategies while proposing surprising new contexts and redatings. Volumes 4 to 6 are in preparation.

Drawing especially on the many scholarly discoveries of recent years, this biography examines the life – and death ‒ of one of the greatest Romantic poets. Based on sceptical historical investigation and featuring an in-depth look at Shelley’s personal, financial and familial situation, it builds a compelling narrative about a controversial writer and thinker whose personal and philosophical convictions caused much turmoil during his short yet extraordinarily influential life. The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley reveals sides of the author not often studied. It looks at Shelley as an intensely loving, thoughtful and responsible man and father, who (except in one case) took exemplary care of the women he loved and who fell in love with him. It shows how significant his status as a gentleman was; it examines his poetry, letters, notebooks and discursive prose so that readers can comprehend the most important concerns of his life; it explores the financial and medical grounds for his years of exile; it is also the first biography to take account of his recently discovered early long poem the Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things. This biography offers readers a unique look at a famous poet, scholar, gentleman, democrat, atheist and tragic icon of English Romanticism.

Gale Researcher Guide for: Percy Bysshe Shelley, a Poetic Radical is selected from Gale's academic platform Gale Researcher. These study guides provide peer-reviewed articles that allow students early success in finding scholarly materials and to gain the confidence and vocabulary needed to pursue deeper research.

Beginning with a reassessment of contemporary romantic studies, this book provides a modern critical comparison of Keats and Shelley. The study offers detailed close readings of a variety of literary genres (including the romance, lyric, elegy and literary fragment) adopted by Keats and Shelley to explore their poetic treatment of self and form. The poetic careers of Keats and Shelley embrace a tragic affirmation of those darker elements latent in the earlier writings to meditate on their own posthumous reception and reputation. Fresh readings of Keats and Shelley show how they conceive of the self as fictional and anticipate Nietzsche's modern theories of subjectivity. Nietzsche's conception of the subject as a site of conflicting fictions usefully measures this emergent sense of poetic self and form in Keats and Shelley. This Nietzschean perspective enriches our appreciation of the considerable artistic achievement of these two significant second-generation romantic poets.

Percy Bysshe Shelley joined the deluge of sightseers that poured onto the Continent after Napoleon's defeat in 1814, and over the next eight years Shelley followed major travelling trends, visiting Switzerland in 1816 and Italy from 1818. Shelley's Eye is the first study to address Shelley's participation in the travel culture of Post-Napoleonic Europe, and the first to consider Shelley as an important travel writer in his own right. This book is informed by original research on a wide range of period travel writings, including Mary Shelley and Shelley's neglected collaboration, History of a Six Weeks' Tour (1817), in which 'Mont Blanc' first appeared. Fully responsive to the culture of travel, Shelley's travel prose and poetry form fascinating conversations with major Romantic travellers like Byron, Wollstonecraft, and Wordsworth, as well as lesser-known but widely read travel writers of the day, including Morris Birkbeck, Charlotte Eaton, and John Chetwode Eustace. In this provocative study, Benjamin Colbert demonstrates how the Grand Tour remains a vital cultural metaphor for Shelley and his contemporaries, under pressure from mass travel and popular culture. Shelley's travel prose and 'visionary' poetry explore motives of perception underlying travel discourse and posit an authentic 'aesthetic vision' that reconfigures social, historical, and political meanings of 'sights' from the perspective of an ideal tourist-observer. Shelley's Eye offers a new perspective on Shelley's intellectual history. It is also a timely and important contribution to recent interdisciplinary scholarship that aims to re-evaluate Romantic idealism in the context of physical, experiential, or material cultural practices.

The widespread and culturally significant impact of Percy Bysshe Shelley's writings in Europe constitutes a particularly interesting case for a reception study because of the variety of responses they evoked. If radical readers cherished the 'red' Shelley, others favoured the lyrical poet, whose work was, like Byron's, anthologized and set to music. His major dramatic works, The Cenci and Prometheus Unbound, inspired numerous fin-de-siècle and expressionist dramatists and producers from Paris to Moscow. Shelley was read by, and influenced, the novelist Stendhal, the political theorist Engels, the Spanish symbolist Jiménez, and the Russian modernist poet Akhmatova. This exciting collection of essays by an international team of leading scholars considers translations, critical and biographical reviews, fictionalizations of his life, and other creative responses. It probes into transnational cross-currents to demonstrate the depth of Shelley's impact on European culture since his death in 1822. It will be an indispensable research resource for academics, critics, and writers with interests in Romanticism and its legacies.

Sally West's timely study is the first book-length exploration of Coleridge's influence on Shelley's poetic development. Beginning with a discussion of Shelley's views on Coleridge as a man and as a poet, West argues that there is a direct correlation between Shelley's desire for political and social transformation and the way in which he appropriates the language, imagery, and forms of Coleridge, often transforming their original meaning through subtle readjustments of context and emphasis. While she situates her work in relation to recent concepts of literary influence, West is focused less on the psychology of the poets than on the poetry itself. She explores how elements such as the development of imagery and the choice of poetic form, often learnt from earlier poets, are intimately related to poetic purpose. Thus on one level, her book explores how the second-generation Romantic poets reacted to the beliefs and ideals of the first, while on another it addresses the larger question of how poets become poets, by returning the work of one writer to the literary context from which it developed. Her book is essential reading for specialists in the Romantic period and for scholars interested in theories of poetic influence.

This book establishes Percy Bysshe Shelley's view of poetry as 'living melody' and sets it within the wider context of Romantic-era thought.