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Cover image of The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley
Cover image of The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley
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The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley

edited by Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat

Volume
Volume 1
Publication Date
Binding Type

The first American edition of Shelley's complete poetry since 1892—with more poems, fragments, and collations than any previous collective edition.

Winner of the Richard J. Finneran Award of the Society for Textual Scholarship, CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title of the Choice ACRL

A milestone in literary scholarship, the publication of the Johns Hopkins edition of The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley makes available for the first time critically edited clear texts of all poems and translations that Shelley published or circulated among friends, as well as diplomatic texts of his...

The first American edition of Shelley's complete poetry since 1892—with more poems, fragments, and collations than any previous collective edition.

Winner of the Richard J. Finneran Award of the Society for Textual Scholarship, CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title of the Choice ACRL

A milestone in literary scholarship, the publication of the Johns Hopkins edition of The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley makes available for the first time critically edited clear texts of all poems and translations that Shelley published or circulated among friends, as well as diplomatic texts of his significant incomplete poetic drafts and fragments. Edited upon historical principles by Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat, the multi volume edition will offer more poems and fragments than any previous collective edition, arranged in the order of their first circulation. These texts are followed by the most extensive collations hitherto available and detailed commentaries that describe their contextual origins and subsequent reception. Rejected passages of released poems appear as supplements to those poems, while other poetic drafts that Shelley rejected or left incomplete at his death will be grouped according to either their publication histories or the notebooks in which they survive.

Volume One includes Shelley's first four works containing poetry (all prepared for publication before his expulsion from Oxford), as well as "The Devil's Walk" (circulated in August 1812), and a series of short poems that he sent to friends between 1809 and 1814, including a bawdy satire on his parents and "Oh wretched mortal," a poem never before published. An appendix discusses poems lost or erroneously attributed to the young Shelley.

"These early poems are important not only biographically but also aesthetically, for they provide detailed evidence of how Shelley went about learning his craft as a poet, and the differences between their tone and that of his mature short poetry index a radical change in his self-image... The poems in Volume I, then, demonstrate Shelley's capacity to write verse in a range of stylistic registers. This early verse, even in its most abandoned forays into Sensibility, the Gothic, political satire, and vulgarity—perhaps especially in these most apparently idiosyncratic gestures—provides telling access to its own cultural moment, as well as to Shelley's art and thought in general."—from the Editorial Overview

Reviews

Reviews

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.

Will become an indispensable reference work for all who study Shelley... The first volume... auspiciously inaugurates Shelley studies for a new millennium.

If ever an edition deserved the chimerical epithet 'definitive' this is it. A more comprehensive collation of relevant materials, or a more sensitive, sensible, and reader-friendly presentation of evidence, is inconceivable. All Shelleyans owe Reiman and Fraistat a debt of gratitude. The edition this volume inaugurates will be an essential acquisition for academic libraries and should become the standard scholarly reference for all citations of Shelley's poems.

The editors' impressive combined knowledge, theoretical understanding, and practical skills add up to a brilliant first installment of what will undoubtedly be a monumental edition—the Shelley edition for our time.

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About

Book Details

Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
6.125
x
9.25
Pages
544
ISBN
9780801861192
Illustration Description
7 halftones
Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Editorial Overview
Abbreviations
Texts
Original Poetry: by Victor and Cazire
The Wandering Jew; or, The Victim of the External Avenger
Posthumous Fragments of Margaret

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Editorial Overview
Abbreviations
Texts
Original Poetry: by Victor and Cazire
The Wandering Jew; or, The Victim of the External Avenger
Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson; Being Poems Found
Amongst the Papers of the Noted Female who Attempted the Life of the King in 1786
Poems from St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian: A Romance
The Devil's Walk
Ten Early Poems (1809-1814)
Commentaries
Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire
The Wandering Jew; or, The Victim of the External Avenger
Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson
Poems from St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian
The Devil's Walk
Ten Early Poems (1809-1814)
Historical Collations
Introduction
Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire
The Wandering Jew; or, The Victim of the External Avenger
Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson
Poems from St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian
The Devil's Walk
Ten Early Poems (1809-1814)
Appendixes
Introduction
A. Latin School Exercises
B. Prose Treated as Poems
C. Lost Works
D. Dubia
E. Misattributions
Index of Titles
Index of First Lines

Author Bios
Donald H. Reiman
Featured Contributor

Donald H. Reiman

Donald H. Reiman is an adjunct professor of English at the University of Delaware.
Featured Contributor

Neil Fraistat

Neil Fraistat is professor emeritus of English at the University of Maryland and the president of the Keats-Shelley Association of America.