Percy Bysshe Shelley (17921822) was one of the major poets of the English Romantic period. This is the fifth volume of a six-volume edition of The Poems of Shelley, which aims to present all of Shelleys poems in chronological order and with full annotation. Date and circumstances of composition are provided for each poem and all manuscript and printed sources relevant to establishing an authoritative text are freshly examined and assessed. Headnotes and footnotes furnish the personal, literary, historical and scientific information necessary to an informed reading of Shelleys varied and allusive verse.
Most of the poems in the present volume were composed between late summer 1821 and late January 1822. They include Hellas, a lyrical drama written in support of the Greek War of Independence, composed in SeptemberNovember 1821 and published in FebruaryMarch 1822, his unfinished tragedy Charles the First which he had been planning for several years, as well as important shorter poems such as The Indian Girls Song, Autumn: a Dirge and his Epitaph for John Keats.
In addition to accompanying commentaries, there are extensive bibliographies to the poems, a chronological table of Shelleys life and publications, and indexes to titles and first lines. Now completed, this is the most comprehensive edition of Shelleys poetry available to students and scholars.
Arvustused
[ T]he editors have produced a formidable resource of which earlier readers, including the poems first audiences, could barely have dreamt. In doing so they have fulfilled the foundational, democratizing aim of the Longman series as envisaged by figures such as Bateson and Matthews of making available to the reader the array of influences and contexts that inform a poetic corpus such as Shelleys. If for some readers the pleasures of the novelty of Shelley have ceased, then they are sure to be rekindled by the scrupulous exactness and breadth of explanation to be found in these volumes. - Ross Wilson, The TLS, December 13th 2024
Note by the General Editors
Note on Illustrations
Preface to Volume Five
Acknowledgements
Chronological Table of Shelleys Life and Publications
Abbreviations
THE POEMS
409 In the great morning of the world
410 As the sunrise to the night [ Fragment: To Italy]
411 Hellas
411 Appendix Lines connected with Hellas
412 The Indian Girls Song [ Lines to an Indian Air]
413 Which like a crane, its distant home pursuing
414 An archer stood upon the Tower of Babel
415 Autumn: a Dirge
416 Unfathomable Sea! whose waves are years [ Time]
417 The flower that smiles today [ Mutability]
418 A fresh fair child stood by my side [ Love, Hope, Desire, and Fear]
(Translation of Brunetto Latini, Il Tesoretto xxi 82156)
418 Appendix Brunetto Latini, Il Tesoretto xxi 82156
419 A capering, squalid, squalling one
420 Epitaph [ On Keats]
421 The Zucca
422 Rough wind that moanest loud [ A Dirge]
423 Alas, if I could feign
424 There was a star when Heaven was young
425 Though thou scatterest their ashes
426 Charles the First
426 Appendix Lines connected with Charles the First
427 A widowed bird sate mourning for her love [ A Song]
428 Art thou pale for weariness [ To the Moon]
429 Lines to [ Sonnet to Byron]
Appendix A: The Order of the Poems in 1822
Appendix B: [ ? ] / As when within a chasm of [ ?mighty] seas
Appendix C: O thou whose cold hand tears the veils from error (Translation
of Petrarch, Africa vi 9012)
Index of Titles
Index of First Lines
Carlene Adamson was formerly Assistant Professor of English at Vesalius College, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium.
Will Bowers is Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Thought at Queen Mary University of London, UK.
Jack Donovan was formerly Reader in English at the University of York, UK.
Kelvin Everest is A. C. Bradley Professor Emeritus at the University of Liverpool, UK.
Mathelinda Nabugodi is Lecturer in Comparative Literature at University College London, UK.
Michael Rossington is Professor of Romantic Literature at Newcastle University, UK.
