The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley

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 Determined to hasten that day, she recovered his unpublished and uncollected poems and sifted through his surviving notebooks and papers.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.

An indispensable reference work for all who study Shelley.
—praise for volume 1, Studies in Romanticism

A more comprehensive collation of relevant materials, or a more sensitive, sensible, and reader-friendly presentation of evidence, is inconceivable.
—praise for volume 1, The Wordsworth Circle

A scholarly delight.
—praise for volume 2, Romanticism on the Net

In gathering together all his earliest pieces, including some that have been unavailable in standard editions of the collected poetry, Donald Reiman and Neil Fraistat''s meticulously edited volume brings out the aims Shelley had for his verse, and the effects he sought, which remained surprisingly uniform.
—praise for volume 1, London Review of Books

What makes this volume so exceptional (like its predecessors) is not only the state-of-the-art editing, but also the knowledgeable commentaries that give information on the poems'' composition, possible sources and influences, publication, and most welcome, their reception history. . . . This gigantic editorial project cannot be praised highly enough.
—praise for volume 3, Zeitschrift fuer Anglistik und Amerikanistik

A monumental edition—the Shelley edition for our time.
—praise for volume 1, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America

Will almost certainly be the standard in Shelley scholarship.
—praise for volume 1, Studies in English Literature

[I]t is tremendously exciting to have access to a resource that provides such an intimate look into the poet''s world and his creative process.
—praise for volume 3, The Year''s Work in English Studies

This edition will undoubtedly be indispensable for the serious study of Shelley''s poetry.
—praise for volume 1, Review of English Studies

Now that [Shelley''s] poetry is coming into such revealing clarity of focus, thanks to editions such as this one, the question of its value can be explored with more confidence than ever before.
—praise for volume 3, Times Literary Supplement

These youthful poems prove that Shelley''s enthusiasm for political solutions to moral problems was neither intellectual fakery nor aristocratic affection.
—praise for volume 1, Sewanee Review

This is a critical volume of Shelley''s works for the twenty-first century—in short, a scholarly masterpiece. No academic library should be without it.
—praise for volume 3, Choice

The detail and precision of the textual editing here are exemplary: the publication history of the poems, along with the tangled manuscript evidence behind and alongside the original volumes, is dealt with clearly and (when need be) decisively, to produce a hugely authoritative—as well as huge—edition.
—praise for volume 3, Times Literary Supplement

This latest installment of The Complete Poetry is nothing less than a landmark in Shelley studies: comprehensive and reliable, necessary and illuminating.
—praise for volume 3, Keats-Shelley Journal

Once it is completed, this will be *the* definitive critical edition of the *complete* poetry of P.B. Shelley that the scholarly community has been awaiting for such a long time. We can already say: it will have been worth the wait.
—praise for volume 2, Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik (ZAA)

The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley is a much needed work and Reiman and Fraistat are the best possible people to have done it. The research, knowledge, experience, and general thoughtfulness that have gone into the project are truly impressive. It will be a landmark event of Shelley scholarship.
—Jack Stillinger, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, praise for volume 1

Donald Reiman and Neil Fraistat bring to their new edition an unrivaled knowledge of the textual evidence and a superb grasp of the important historical and critical issues. Their presentation of and commentary on the poetry Shelley produced up through his elopement with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin in July 1814 is clarifying and revealing in itself and encourages the highest possible expectations for the volumes to follow. Their editorial principles, centered around the objective of offering critical redactions of single versions of all the poems arranged chronologically in the order in which Shelley released these versions to a particular public, are scrupulously conceived and meticulously applied. Scholars, students, and general readers of Shelley''s poetry have reason to celebrate.
—William Keach, Brown University, praise for volume 1

To call this edition magisterial is to fall back on too lax a term of praise: it is rather a monument of precise, assured erudition in total command of the poems and almost two centuries of commentary on them, an awesome achievement that as it unfolds will replace all previous texts of Shelley''s poetry as well as the whole of their contexts. I cannot imagine it being done by anyone else—or, for that matter, better.
—Stuart Curran, Brown University, praise for volume 1