The Poems Of Shelley Volume Five

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 first volume of the five-volume The Poems of Shelley, which presents 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 supply the personal, literary, historical and scientific information necessary to an informed reading of Shelley’s varied and allusive verse. The present volume includes the 'Esdaile' poems, which only entered the public domain in the 1950s, printed in chronological order and integrated with the rest of Shelley's early output, and Queen Mab, the first of Shelley’s major poems, together with its extensive prose notes. The seminal Alastor volume is placed in the detailed context of Shelley’s overall poetic development. The ‘Scrope Davies’ notebook, only discovered in 1976, furnishes two otherwise unknown sonnets as well as alternative versions of ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ and ‘Mont Blanc’, which significantly influence our understanding of these important poems. This first volume contains new datings, and makes numerous corrections to long-established errors and misunderstandings in the transmission of Shelley's work. Its annotations and headnotes provide new perspectives on Shelley's literary, philosophical and political development The volumes of The Poems of Shelley form the most comprehensive edition of Shelley's poetry available to students and scholars.

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.

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 third volume of the five-volume The Poems of Shelley, which presents 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 autumn 1819 and autumn 1820. The poems written in response to the political crisis in England following the ‘Peterloo’ massacre in August 1819 feature largely, among them The Mask of Anarchy and 'An Ode (Arise, arise, arise!)'. The popular songs, which Shelley intended to gather into a volume to inspire reformers from the labouring classes, several accompanied by significantly new textual material recovered from draft manuscripts, are included, as are the important political works 'Ode to Liberty', 'Ode to Naples' and Oedipus Tyrannus, Shelley's burlesque Greek tragedy on the Queen Caroline affair. Other major poems featured include 'The Sensitive-Plant', 'Ode to the West Wind', 'Letter to Maria Gisborne', an exuberant translation from the ancient Greek of the Homeric 'Hymn to Mercury', and the brilliantly inventive 'The Witch of Atlas'. In addition to accompanying commentaries, there are extensive bibliographies, a chronology of Shelley’s life, and indexes to titles and first lines. Leigh Hunt's informative Preface of 1832 to The Mask of Anarchy is also included as an Appendix. The volumes of The Poems of Shelley form the most comprehensive edition of Shelley's poetry available to students and scholars.

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 fourth volume of the five-volume The Poems of Shelley, which presents 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 written between late autumn 1820 and late summer 1821. They include Adonais, Shelley’s lament on the death of John Keats, widely recognised as one of the finest elegies in English poetry, as well as Epipsychidion, a poem inspired by his relationship with the nineteen-year-old Teresa Viviani (‘Emilia’), the object of an intense but temporary fascination for Shelley. The poems of this period show the extent both of Shelley’s engagement with Keats’s volume Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820) — a copy of which he first read in October 1820 — and of his interest in Italian history, culture and politics. Shelley’s translations of some of his own poems into Italian and his original compositions in the language are also included here. 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. The volumes of The Poems of Shelley form the most comprehensive edition of Shelley’s poetry available to students and scholars.

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 second volume of the five-volume The Poems of Shelley, which presents 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. This volume makes extensive use of the Shelley manuscripts in the Bodleian Library and draws on the substantial recent research which has appeared on Shelley's text and contexts, and on members of his circle such as Mary Shelley, Byron, Godwin and others. It offers significant new datings and contextual exposition of major works including Prometheus Unbound, Laon and Cythna, 'Julian and Maddalo', The Cenci, and Shelley's translations from the Greek, notably his highly original translation of Euripides' The Cyclops. There are also comprehensive treatments of some of Shelley's best known shorter poems, such as 'Lines written among the Euganean Hills' and 'Ozymandias'. The annotation demonstrates the extraordinary range and richness of Shelley's literary intelligence, and situates his work in the revolutionary politics and social upheavals of the early nineteenth century. The text and annotation are supported by an extensive bibliography, a chronology, indexes, and appendices which include a detailed examination of the history of the Cenci story. The volumes of The Poems of Shelley form the most comprehensive edition of Shelley's poetry available to students and scholars.

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 fourth volume of the five-volume The Poems of Shelley, which presents all of Shelley's poems in chronological order and with full annotation. Amongst the poems included in this volume are Epipsychidion and Adonais. Date and circumstances of composition are provided for each poem and all manuscript and printed sources relevant to establishing an authentic and accurate 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.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) was one of the major poets of the English Romantic period. This is the final 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 January 1822 and Shelley’s death on 8 July 1822. These include the lyrics to Jane Williams, Fragments of an Unfinished Drama and The Triumph of Life as well as translations from Goethe’s Faust (1822) and Calderón’s El mágico prodigioso. The appendices include editions of Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things (1811), a poem made publicly accessible by the Bodleian Libraries in 2015 for the first time since its publication, and translations by Shelley from Goethe’s Faust (1815), Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound (1817) and Homer’s Odyssey (probably 1817). 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.

The Ring and the Book, published serially in 1868–9, is one of the most daring and innovative poems in the English language. The story is based on the trial of an Italian nobleman, Guido Franceschini, for the murder of his wife Pompilia in Rome in 1698. Browning’s discovery of the ‘old yellow book’, a bundle of legal documents and letters relating to the trial, on a second-hand market stall in Florence, sparked an imaginative engagement with this sordid tale of domestic cruelty, adultery, and greed which grew, through four years of arduous labour, into an epic peopled not by gods and warriors but by concrete, recognisably human beings. Fusing the technique of the dramatic monologue, the form he had made his own, with the grandeur of classical epic and the vivid realism of the modern novel, Browning created a unique hybrid form that allowed him not only to bring to life an entire historical period but also to reflect on the process of artistic creation itself – the forging of the golden ‘ring’ of the poem from the ‘pure crude fact’ of its historical original. This edition, comprising volumes 5 and 6 in the acclaimed Longman Annotated English Poets edition of Browning’s poems, does full justice to the scope and depth of Browning’s achievement. The headnote in volume 5 gives an authoritative account of the poem’s composition, publication, sources, and reception, making use of hitherto unpublished letters and textual material. In addition to giving readers help, where needed, with historical and linguistic comprehension, the notes track Browning’s formidable range of allusion, from the most erudite to the most vulgar. The appendices in volume 6 present a selection from the original sources, a list of variants from extant proofs, and key passages from Browning’s fascinating and revealing correspondence with one of the earliest readers of the poem, Julia Wedgwood. The aim is to enable readers not just to understand the poem as an object of study, but to take pleasure in its abounding intellectual and emotional energies.