"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 Determined to hasten that day, she recovered his unpublished and uncollected poems and sifted through his surviving notebooks and papers.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, as well as a few 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.
Nora Crook is professor emerita of English literature at Anglia Ruskin University. Neil Fraistat is professor emeritus of English at the University of Maryland and the president of the Keats-Shelley Association of America.
List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Editorial Overview Abbreviations TEXTS From the Triumph MS and Posthumous Poems (Opening Section) The Triumph of Life Lyric Fragments from the Triumph MS "An Unfinished Drama" From Posthumous Poems: Miscellaneous Poems "On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci" "The Fugitives" "The sun is set, the swallows are asleep" Lyrics for Mary W. Shelley's Proserpine and Midas "Arethusa" "Sacred Goddess, Mother Earth" "Song of Apollo" "Song of Pan" Autumn A Dirge "Our boat is asleep in Serchio's stream" The Zucca The good die first- The Two Spirits. An Allegory "Tomorrow" "They die-the dead return not" "O World, O Life, O Time" "Madonna, wherefore hast thou sent to me" "I fear thy kisses, gentle maiden-" "My lost William, thou in whom" "A Portal as of shadowy adamant" "The flower that smiles today" From the Arabic-imitation "One word is too often profaned" "Music" "Death is here, and death is there" "When passion's trance is overpast" "Listen, listen, Mary mine-" "O Mary dear, that you were here" "Wilt thou forget the happy hours" "The fiery mountains answer each other" "Mine eyes were dim with tears unshed" "There was a little lawny islet" "Rose leaves, when the rose is dead" "Unfathomable Sea! whose waves are years" "Tell me, Star, whose wings of light" "Rough wind that moanest loud" "Far, far away, O ye" Jan. 1. 1821 From Posthumous Poems: Fragments "Ginevra" The Historical Tragedy of Charles the First "Mazenghi" "The Woodman and the Nightingale" "Art thou pale for weariness" "I loved-alas, our life is love" "And like a dying lady lean and pale" "These are two friends whose lives were undivided" COMMENTARIES From the Triumph MS and Posthumous Poems (Opening Section) The Triumph of Life Lyric Fragments from the Triumph MS "An Unfinished Drama" From Posthumous Poems: Miscellaneous Poems "On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci" "The Fugitives" "The sun is set, the swallows are asleep" Lyrics for Mary W. Shelley's Proserpine and Midas Autumn A Dirge (and Supplements) "Our boat is asleep in Serchio's stream" The Zucca The good die first- The Two Spirits. An Allegory "Tomorrow" "They die-the dead return not" "O World, O Life, O Time" "Madonna, wherefore hast thou sent to me" "I fear thy kisses, gentle maiden-" "My lost William, thou in whom" "A Portal as of shadowy adamant" "The flower that smiles today" From the Arabic-imitation "One word is too often profaned" "Music" "Death is here, and death is there" "When passion's trance is overpast" "Listen, listen, Mary mine" "O Mary dear, that you were here" "Wilt thou forget the happy hours" "The fiery mountains answer each other" "Mine eyes were dim with tears unshed" "There was a little lawny islet" "Rose leaves, when the rose is dead" "Unfathomable Sea! whose waves are years" "Tell me, Star, whose wings of light" "Rough wind that moanest loud" "Far, far away, O ye" Jan. 1. 1821 From Posthumous Poems: Fragments "Ginevra" The Historical Tragedy of Charles the First "Mazenghi" "The Woodman and the Nightingale" "Art thou pale for weariness" "I loved-alas, our life is love" "And like a dying lady lean and pale" "These are two friends whose lives were undivided" HISTORICAL COLLATIONS From the Triumph MS and Posthumous Poems (Opening Section) From Posthumous Poems: Miscellaneous Poems From Posthumous Poems: Fragments APPENDIXES A. Contents of Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1824), Together with a List of Manuscript Sources of Items in This Volume B. Mary W. Shelley's Preface to Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1824) C. Source for "Ginevra": Marco Lastri, L'osservatore fiorentino D. Charles the First: Ancillary Material I. PBS's Reading Notes II. Sketch of Acts I and II III. Jottings (Preliminary) Contributors Index of Titles Index of First Lines
This new volume of JHU Press's landmark Shelley edition contains posthumous and unpublished poems edited from original manuscripts.
"Will almost certainly be the standard in Shelley scholarship," --Studies in English Literature "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. These latter passages give exceptional guidance and allow scholar and amateur alike to make themselves familiar with the critical debate... This gigantic editorial project cannot be praised highly enough. It meets the severest standards of modern editing... The whole scholarly community is deeply indebted to everyone involved in this collaborative enterprise." --Zeitschrift fuer Anglistik und Amerikanistik "This latest installment of The Complete Poetry is nothing less than a landmark in Shelley studies: comprehensive and reliable, necessary and illuminating." --Keats-Shelley Journal "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." --Choice "The years between 1814 and 1818 were amongst the most personally turbulent and poetically productive of Shelley's brief life; it is thus tremendously exciting to have access to a resource that provides such an intimate look into the poet's world and his creative process.The Year's Work in English Studies" --The Year's Work in 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." --Times Literary Supplement "An indispensable reference work for all who study Shelley." --Studies in Romanticism "A scholarly delight." --Romanticism on the Net "A more comprehensive collation of relevant materials, or a more sensitive, sensible, and reader-friendly presentation of evidence, is inconceivable." --The Wordsworth Circle "A monumental edition--the Shelley edition for our time." --Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America
