Shelleyan Reimaginings And Influence

This volume is a wide-ranging, sensitive study of Percy Bysshe Shelley's response to previous writers and cultural influences, and of his influence on later nineteenth-century writers.

Through attuned close readings, this volume brings out the imaginative and formal brilliance of Percy Bysshe Shelley's writing as it explores his involvement in processes of dialogue and influence. Shelley recognizes that poetic individuality is the reward of connectedness with other writers and cultural influences. 'A great Poem is a fountain forever overflowing with the waters of wisdom and delight', he writes, 'and after one person and one age has exhausted all its divine effluence which their peculiar relations enable them to share, another and yet another succeeds, and new relations are ever developed, the source of an unforeseen and an unconceived delight' (A Defence of Poetry). He is among the major Romantic poetic exponents and theorists of influence, because of his passionately intelligent commitment to the onward dissemination of ideas and feelings, and to the unpredictable ways in which poets position themselves and are culturally positioned between past and future. The book has a tripartite structure. The first three chapters seek to illuminate his response to representative texts, figures, and themes that constitute the triple pillars of his cultural inheritance: the classical world (Plato); Renaissance poetry (Spenser and Milton); Christianity and, in particular, the concept of deity and the Bible. The second and major section of the book explores Shelley's relations and affinities with, as well as differences from, his immediate predecessors and contemporaries: Hazlitt and Lamb; Wordsworth; Coleridge; Southey; Byron; Keats (including the influence of Dante on Shelley's elegy for his fellow Romantic) and the great painter J. M. W. Turner, with whom he is often linked. The third section considers Shelley's reception by later nineteenth-century writers, figures influenced by and responding to Shelley including Beddoes, Hemans, Landon, Tennyson, and Swinburne. A coda discusses the body of critical work on Shelley produced by A. C. Bradley, a figure who stands at the threshold of twentieth-century thinking about Shelley.

Shortlisted for the University English Book Prize 2022Shelley’s Broken World is a provocative and profound reassessment of Shelley’s poetic art and thought.Bysshe Inigo Coffey returns to a peculiarity of Shelley’s expressive repertoire first noticed by his Victorian readers and editors: his innovatory use of pauses, which registered as irregularities in ears untuned to his innovations. But his pauses are more than a quirk; various intermittences are at the centre of Shelley’s artistry and his thought. This book aims to transform the philosophical, scientific, and aesthetic contexts in which Shelley is positioned. It offers a ground-breaking analysis of his reading, and is the first study to refer to and include images of the unpublished ‘Marlow List’, a record of the books Shelley left behind him on his departure for Italy in 1818. Shelley’s prosody grew to articulate his sense that actuality is experienced as ruptured and fractured with gaps and limit-points.He shows us the weakness of the actual. As we approach the bicentenary of the poet’s death, Shelley’s Broken World provides an exciting new beginning for the study of a major Romantic poet, the history of materialism, and prosody.

This new volume of JHU Press's landmark Shelley edition contains posthumous poems edited from original manuscripts. "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, and other 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.

This book explores John Keats’s reading practices and intertextual dialogues with other writers. It also examines later writers’ engagements with Keats’s poetry. Finally, the book honors the distinguished Keats scholar Jack Stillinger and includes an essay surveying his career as well as a bibliography of his major publications. The first section of the volume, “Theorizing Keats’s Reading,” contains four essays that identify major patterns in the poet’s reading habits and responses to other works. The next section, “Keats’s Reading,” consists of six essays that examine Keats’s work in relation to specific earlier authors and texts. The four essays in the third section, “Reading Keats,” consider how Keats’s poetry influenced the work of later writers and became embedded in British and American literary traditions. The final section of the book, “Contemporary Poetic Responses,” features three scholar-poets who, in poetry and/or prose commentary, discuss and exemplify Keats’s impact on their work.

Through attuned close readings, this volume brings out the imaginative and formal brilliance of Percy Bysshe Shelley's writing as it explores his involvement in processes of dialogue and influence. Shelley recognizes that poetic individuality is the reward of connectedness with other writers and cultural influences. 'A great Poem is a fountain forever overflowing with the waters of wisdom and delight', he writes, 'and after one person and one age has exhausted all its divine effluence which their peculiar relations enable them to share, another and yet another succeeds, and new relations are ever developed, the source of an unforeseen and an unconceived delight' (A Defence of Poetry). He is among the major Romantic poetic exponents and theorists of influence, because of his passionately intelligent commitment to the onward dissemination of ideas and feelings, and to the unpredictable ways in which poets position themselves and are culturally positioned between past and future. The book has a tripartite structure. The first three chapters seek to illuminate his response to representative texts, figures, and themes that constitute the triple pillars of his cultural inheritance: the classical world (Plato); Renaissance poetry (Spenser and Milton); Christianity and, in particular, the concept of deity and the Bible. The second and major section of the book explores Shelley's relations and affinities with, as well as differences from, his immediate predecessors and contemporaries: Hazlitt and Lamb; Wordsworth; Coleridge; Southey; Byron; Keats (including the influence of Dante on Shelley's elegy for his fellow Romantic) and the great painter J. M. W. Turner, with whom he is often linked. The third section considers Shelley's reception by later nineteenth-century writers, figures influenced by and responding to Shelley including Beddoes, Hemans, Landon, Tennyson, and Swinburne. A coda discusses the body of critical work on Shelley produced by A. C. Bradley, a figure who stands at the threshold of twentieth-century thinking about Shelley.

This volume explores ‘the labyrinth of what we call Coleridge’ (Virginia Woolf): his poems and prose, their sources, interpretation and reception; his life, troubled marriage and fatherhood, conversation, changing intellectual contexts and legacy. Major entries cover such canonical works as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel, ‘Kubla Khan’, the ‘conversation poems’ and Biographia Literaria. But a fuller understanding of Coleridge must embrace many lesser-known poems – lyrics, satire, comical squibs. The prose – critical, philosophical, political, religious – ranges from his early radical writings to the more conservative On the Constitution of the Church and State, his influential Shakespeare lectures, and the vast resource of the notebooks. Coleridge read widely throughout his life and engaged extensively with the work of, among many others, Milton, Fielding, Berkeley, Priestley, Kant, Schelling. One of his most important relationships was with William Wordsworth. Another was with Sara Hutchinson. Entries trace Coleridge’s changing reputation, from brilliant young activist to the ‘Sage of Highgate’ to the later apostle of the theories of the imagination and of Practical Criticism. Other topics covered include opium, plagiarism, the French Revolution, Pantisocracy, Unitarianism, and the Salutation and Cat tavern.

Two centuries after Percy Shelley's death, his writings continue to resonate in remarkable ways. Shelley addressed climate change, women's liberation, nonbinary gender, and political protest, while speaking to Indigenous, queer/trans, disabled, displaced, and working-class communities. He still inspires artists and social justice movements around the world today. Yet Percy Shelley for Our Times reveals an even more farsighted writer, one whose poetic methodology went beyond the didactic powers of prophetic art. Not historicist, presentist, or transhistorical, Shelley 'for our times' conceives worlds outside himself, his poetry, and his era, envisioning how audiences connect and collaborate across space and time. This collection revitalizes a writer once considered an adolescent of idealist protest, showing how his interwoven poetics of relationality continually revisits the meaning of community and the contemporary. This title is part of the Flip it Open programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.