The Poems of Shelley: Volume Five by Adamson, Carlene; Bowers, Will; Donovan, Jack;

Short description:

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was one of the major Romantic poets, and wrote what is critically recognised as some of the finest lyric poetry in the English language. This is the fifth volume of the five-volume　The Poems of Shelley, which presents all of Shelley’s poems in chronological order and with full annotation. 

Long description:

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) 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 Shelley’s 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 Shelley’s 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 September–November 1821 and published in February–March 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 Girl’s 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 Shelley’s life and publications, and indexes to titles and first lines. Now completed, this is the most comprehensive edition of Shelley’s poetry available to students and scholars.

‘[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 Shelley’s. 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

Table of Contents:

Note by the General Editors

Note on Illustrations

Preface to Volume Five

Acknowledgements

Chronological Table of Shelley’s 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 Girl’s 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 82–156)

418 Appendix  Brunetto Latini, Il Tesoretto xxi 82–156

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 901–2)

Index of Titles

Index of First Lines