The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley

by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Neil Fraistat (Editor), Nora Crook (Editor), Stephen Behrendt (Editor), Stuart Curran (Editor)

Overview

The latest volume of the acclaimed and magisterial Hopkins Press edition of Percy Bysshe Shelley's poetry, covering the years 1818 to early 1820, the first phase of Shelley's Italian period.

Volume Four in the esteemed The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley collection contains some of the works that established Shelley's enduring reputation: Julian and Maddalo, in which he "ceased to be a subject of Time, and became a citizen of Eternity," according to a Victorian editor; The Cenci, an indictment of tyranny, domestic and political, the most actable drama in English of the Romantic period; The Mask of Anarchy, the "greatest poem of political protest ever written in English"; Peter Bell the Third, a brilliant satire on Wordsworth; the fiery sonnet "England in 1819"; an eclogue for women's voices (Rosalind and Helen); playful, sophisticated songs like "Love's Philosophy" and sad verses like "Stanzas, Written in dejection." During these turbulent years Shelley broadened his scope, experimenting with a variety of forms and genres and composing the most openly politically engaged poems of his maturity. As in previous volumes, extensive original research and discussions of the poems' composition, influences, publication, circulation, reception, and critical history accompany detailed records of textual variants. Appendixes range from Mary Shelley's editorial notes to jottings by Shelley taken from a hitherto unrecognized second source for The Cenci. Readers will find in Volume Four fresh readings, new contexts, and discoveries—hallmarks of the Hopkins Press The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781421451909
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date:	11/04/2025
Pages:	1080
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 1.97(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Neil Fraistat is professor emeritus of English at the University of Maryland.

Nora Crook is professor emerita of English literature at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge.

Stephen C. Behrendt is the George Holmes Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Nebraska. He is the coeditor of Romanticism and Women Poets: Opening the Doors of Reception and Approaches to Teaching British Women Poets of the Romantic Period.

Neil Fraistat is professor emeritus of English at the University of Maryland. Nora Crook is professor emerita of English literature at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge.

Table of Contents

	List of Illustrations	xi
	Acknowledgments	xiii
	Editorial Overview	xix
	Abbreviations	xli
	Texts
	Original Poetry	3
	Letter [1] ("Here I sit with my paper, my pen and my ink")	7
	Letter [2] (To Miss _ From Miss _)	9
	Song. ("Cold, cold is the blast when December is howling")	11
	Song. ("Come _! sweet is the hour")	13
	Song. Despair	14
	Song. Sorrow	15
	Song. Hope	16
	Song. Translated from the Italian	17
	Song. Translated from the German	18
	The Irishman's Song	18
	Song. ("Fierce roars the midnight storm")	19
	Song. To _ ("Ah! sweet is the moonbeam that sleeps on yon fountain")	20
	Song. To _ ("Stern, stern is the voice of fate's fearfull command")	21
	Saint Edmond's Eve	22
	Revenge	28
	Ghasta; or, The Avenging Demon!!!	30
	Fragment, or The Triumph of Conscience	37
	The Wandering Jew; or, The Victim of the Eternal Avenger	39
	Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson; Being Poems Found Amongst the Papers of that Noted Female who Attempted the Life of the King in 1786	89
	Advertisement	92
	"Ambition, power, and avarice, now have hurl'd"	93
	Fragment. Supposed to be an Epithalamium of Francis Ravaillac and Charlotte Corde	95
	Despair	99
	Fragment. ("Yes! all is past--swift time has fled away")	100
	The Spectral Horseman	101
	Melody to a Scene of Former Times	102
	Poems from St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian: A Romance	105
	"'T was dead of the night, when I sat in my dwelling"	109
	"Ghosts of the dead! have I not heard your yelling"	110
	Ballad. ("The death-bell beats!_")	111
	Song. ("How swiftly through heaven's wide expanse")	114
	Song. ("How stern are the woes of the desolate mourner")	115
	Song. ("Ah! faint are her limbs, and her footstep is weary")	116
	The Devil's Walk	119
	The Devil's Walk, a Ballad	123
	Supplement: Letter Version of The Devil's Walk	128
	Ten Early Poems (1809-1814)	131
	"A Cat in distress"	135
	"How swiftly through Heaven's wide expanse"	136
	"Oh wretched mortal, hard thy fate!"	138
	To Mary who died in this opinion	138
	"Why is it said thou canst but live"	139
	"As you will see I wrote to you" [1st letter to E. F. Graham]	140
	"Dear dear dear dear dear dear Graeme!" [2nd letter to E. F. Graham]	142
	"Sweet star! which gleaming oer the darksome scene"	144
	"Bear witness Erin! when thine injured isle"	145
	"Thy dewy looks sink in my breast"	145
	Commentaries
	Original Poetry	149
	The Wandering Jew; or, The Victim of the Eternal Avenger	189
	Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson	235
	Poems from St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian	261
	The Devil's Walk	281
	Ten Early Poems (1809-1814)	295
	Historical Collations
	Introduction	333
	Original Poetry	335
	The Wandering Jew; or, The Victim of the Eternal Avenger	355
	Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson	375
	Poems from St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian	387
	The Devil's Walk	403
	Ten Early Poems (1809-1814)	411
	Appendixes
	Introduction	433
A.	Latin School Exercises	435
	Epitaphium	435
	In Horologium	437
B.	Prose Treated as Poems	438
	"The Ocean rolls between us"	438
	"Oh Ireland!"	441
C.	Lost Works	442
	Satirical Poem on "L'infame"	443
	Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things	444
	On a Fete at Carlton House	448
	Essay on War	451
	God Save the King	452
D.	Dubia	453
	Poems in the Oxford University and City Herald	453
	Ode, to the Breath of Summer	455
	The Grape. From the Greek Anthologia	455
	Epigram, from the Greek Anthologia. ("We that were wont")	456
	Translation of an Epigram of Vincent Bourne's	457
	On Old Age, from the Greek Anthology	458
	Venus and the Muses, from the Same	458
	Unattributed Epigraphs to St. Irvyne	458
	Sadak the Wanderer. A Fragment	460
E.	Misattributions	469
	Epigraph: "If Satan had never fallen"	469
	Lines, Addressed to His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales, on His Being Appointed Regent	469
	The Modern Minerva; or, The Bat's Seminary for Young Ladies. A Satire on Female Education	478
	Anecdotes of Father Murdo	480
	To the Queen of My Heart	482
	Index of Titles	487
	Index of First Lines	491

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

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, University of Pennsylvania, praise for Volume 1

Editorial Reviews

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.
—Times Literary Supplement

Rigorously, enthusiastically, and innovatively edited, this volume has brought excitement and zest to my Shelley-reading life.
—Australian Book Review

With volume seven raising the bar once again, this series is the gold standard for Shelley scholarship. Its expert and illuminating readings are peerless.
—The Coleridge Bulletin

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.
—Keats-Shelley Review

Like the previous [The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley] editions, Crook's latest contribution is both indispensable and delightful, a resource to be prized not only for its careful and authoritative presentation of Shelley's poetry but also for the incisive commentary and contextualization Crook provides throughout....the twin hearts of this edition are, of course, "Texts" and "Commentaries," the former providing the now-definitive texts of each work and the latter a collection of acute analyses that represents the lion's share of this volume's thousand pages. In a slight but useful departure from the earlier volumes in this series, each commentary opens with a headnote that provides item-specific notes as well as information about the text's genesis and transmission and critical history.
—Romantic Circles

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.
—European Romantic Review

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

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.
—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.
—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

[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.
—The Year's Work in English Studies

An indispensable reference work for all who study Shelley.
—Studies in Romanticism

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.
—Zeitschrift fuer Anglistik und Amerikanistik

Will almost certainly be the standard in Shelley scholarship.
—Studies in English Literature

A monumental edition—the Shelley edition for our time.
—Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America

A scholarly delight.
—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.
—London Review of Books

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 Wordsworth Circle

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

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

From the Publisher

A monumental edition—the Shelley edition for our time.

Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America - Steven E. Jones

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 - Susan Wolfson

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.

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

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.

European Romantic Review - Valentina Varinelli

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

Review of English Studies - Anthony Howe

Rigorously, enthusiastically, and innovatively edited, this volume has brought excitement and zest to my Shelley-reading life.

Australian Book Review

A scholarly delight.

Romanticism on the Net

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 - Christoph Bode

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.

Times Literary Supplement - Peter McDonald

An indispensable reference work for all who study Shelley . . . Auspiciously inaugurates Shelley studies for a new millennium.

Studies in Romanticism

Will almost certainly be the standard in Shelley scholarship . . . It is more than a reader hopes for in editorial scholarship.

Studies in English Literature - Susan Morgan

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 Wordsworth Circle - Zachary Leader

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 . . . Auspiciously inaugurates Shelley studies for a new millennium.

Studies in Romanticism - Morton D. Paley

This is a critical volume of Shelley's works for the 21st century—in short, a scholarly masterpiece. No academic library should be without it.

Choice

A monumental edition—the Shelley edition for our time.

Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America

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

With volume seven raising the bar once again, this series is the gold standard for Shelley scholarship. Its expert and illuminating readings are peerless.

The Coleridge Bulletin - Madeleine Callaghan

A more comprehensive collation of relevant materials, or a more sensitive, sensible, and reader-friendly presentation of evidence, is inconceivable.

The Wordsworth Circle

Will almost certainly be the standard in Shelley scholarship . . . It is more than a reader hopes for in editorial scholarship.

Studies in English Literature