The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley

CPPBS 7 is set to become a model for editing modern poetry manuscripts. It strikes a difficult balance between philological rigor and scholarly comprehensiveness on the one hand and readability and usability at different levels of expertise on the other. Textual critics and students of Shelley's poetry will find it equally indispensable, but it will also serve as an important reference work for Mary Shelley scholars.

This outstanding installment of an epoch-making edition of Shelley's verse will transform the opportunities afforded to emerging Shelley scholars.

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.

This latest installment of The Complete Poetry is nothing less than a landmark in Shelley studies: comprehensive and reliable, necessary and illuminating.

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.

[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.

An indispensable reference work for all who study Shelley.

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.

Will almost certainly be the standard in Shelley scholarship.

A monumental edition—the Shelley edition for our time.

A scholarly delight.

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.

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.

This edition will undoubtedly be indispensable for the serious study of Shelley's poetry.

These youthful poems prove that Shelley's enthusiasm for political solutions to moral problems was neither intellectual fakery nor aristocratic affection.

Exciting revelations, new connections, and editorial discoveries abound in volume seven, which is testament to the brilliance of one of our greatest scholars and editors of the Shelleys, Nora Crook.

[T]his volume is a triumph, it is breathtaking, it is monumental, it is a summa.

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.

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.