Book Description: This volume contains one of the fullest, and certainly the most accurately edited, collections of Shelley's poetry and prose available.
This Second Edition is based on the authoritative texts established by Reiman and Fraistat for their scholarly edition, The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Each poetry and prose selection has been reedited from the ground up. Headnotes detailing the textual history of Shelley's major works have been revised and expanded, and many new and revised footnotes are included.
The years since 1977—when the First Edition appeared—have witnessed a renaissance in Shelley studies greater than any since 1870-92. All 23 critical selections are new, and include analysis of Shelley's manuscripts and other textual sources for his writing as well as interpretations.
A Chronology, rigorously updated Selected Bibliography, and Index of Titles and First Lines are also included.
About the series: No other series of classic texts equals the caliber of the Norton Critical Editions. Each volume combines the most authoritative text available with the comprehensive pedagogical apparatus necessary to appreciate the work fully. Careful editing, first-rate translation, and thorough explanatory annotations allow each text to meet the highest literary standards while remaining accessible to students. Each edition is printed on acid-free paper and every text in the series remains in print. Norton Critical Editions are the choice for excellence in scholarship for students at more than 2,000 universities worldwide.
A Simple List This text is a great one, as are all of the Norton anthologies that I have bought over the years. The works it contains are as follows:
Poetry: "Queen Mab" "Alastor" "Stanzas -- April, 1814" "Mutability" "To Wordsworth" "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" "Mont Blanc" Excerpts from "Laon and Cynthia" "To Constantia" "Ozymandias" "Lines written among the Euganean Hills" "Julian and Maddalo" "Stanza written in Dejection" "The Two Spirits -- an Allegory" "The Cenci" "Prometheus Unbound" "The Sensitive-Plant" "Ode to Heaven" "Ode to the West Wind" "The Cloud" "To a Sky-Lark" "Ode to Liberty" "The Mask of Anarchy" "England in 1819" "Sonnet: To the Republic of Benevento" "Sonnet ('Lift not the painted veil')" "Sonnet ('Ye hasten to the grave!')" "Letter to Maria Gisborne" "Peter Bell the Third" "The Witch of Atlas" "Song of Apollo" "Song of Pan" "Epipsychidion" "Adonais" "Hellas" "Written on Hearing the News of the Death of Napoleon" "The Indian Girl's Song" "Song ('Rarely, rarely comest thou')" "The Flower that Smiles Today" "Memory" "To ------ ('Music, when soft voices die')" "When Passion's Trance Is Overpast" "To Jane. The Invitation" "To Jane. The Recollection" "One Word Is Too Often Profaned" "The Serpent Is Shut Out from Paradise Lost" "With a Guitar. To Jane." "To Jane ('The keen stars were twinkling')" "Lines written in the Bay of Lerici "The Triumph of Life"
Prose: "On Love" "On Life" "A Defence of Poetry"
As per Norton tradition, most of the major works and some of the lesser ones have an introduction before them in which historical context is given, major themes explained, and important images or ideas are revealed. This collection also contains twenty-two critical essays by scholars such as Harold Bloom, Michael O'Neill, and Susan J. Wolfson, on Shelley and his life and art, including eleven work-specific critical essays. What a great collection!
A fiery Romantic Shelley is a figure of fire; whenever I read any of his works I sense a tremendous energy and vitality, and a great love of life in all its forms.
Shelley lived by the ideals he set out in his poetry and also his radical politics; complete freedom and the embracement of individual choice, and the rejection of all forms of authority which strangled creativity and the human spirit. At the level of his art, this led to Shelley becoming one of the finest poets of the Romantic era and of the English language for all time, but unfortunately in his personal life and his financial situations, disaster.
Always a restless spirit, Shelley was always on the move; he composed some of his finest poems while he lived for a time in Italy. His work covers a wide range from political pamphlets and criticism (such as his essay 'A defence of poetry') to plays and poems of various types and lengths. His most brilliant poems include an Ode to Keats, 'Prometheus Unbound', and 'Queen Mab', a scathing attack on conventional religious values and political tyranny.
One of Shelley's most attractive aspects is his deep love for and sensitivity to the beauty of nature. Shelley was well read in natural sciences and Astronomy and many of his finest poems (including one addressed to a thunderstorm) capture in vivid colour and detail the changes and endless activity of nature.
Unfortunately Shelley died at the tragically young age of 29 in a boating accident related to a storm, caused to a large degree by his own foolhardy nature. But perhaps there was no more fitting an end to such a fiery, unstable and poetically creative man as him.
This edition contains a good sample of his works as well as several critical essays on Shelley and his work.
A Hero
Percy Bysshe Shelley is undoubtedly one of the double handful of master poets of the English language. He's something more to many of us, a figure of great charisma and daring who spent his life in relentless search of a better way to be than what we're perpetually settling for, politically, erotically, personally. This quest took him into several flavors of exile, and into darker places within; early on he abandoned belief and near the end, some say, abandoned hope. But he wrote what it was like all the way through, and what it should be like, and why writing what it should be like is crucial. He searched always for the road forward, refusing the easy lie of naming the ground beneath his feet that road. Not that he was what we would call an existentialist: his vision of what might prove possible in life marries all the little-but-infinite scenes of love, discovery, and sublimity he'd experienced and never forgotten, and was always at work recasting in stronger and surer words and images.
His most important writings are mid-length and longer pieces. This is something of a paradox as all agree he is anyone's equal as a lyric poet. I recommend his crazy, brilliant early poem "Alastor" as a beginning point. It sketches out the quest he never left off from and gives a heavy, tonic dose of poetry as he conceived it: a stripping off of fear, remorse and all other artificial limits, including those of our very senses, and a dive into the furious streaming colliding fires of the true world to find what's lost there. It's a bit like the visionary journey the astronaut takes near the end of the film 2001. Without the fetus.
This is a great selection, omitting little of importance. The first edition carried all the same poems, but a mostly different set of critical essays. A slightly fuller selection is in print in the Oxford World's Classics series, with less critical apparatus for those who like to go it alone. Shelley's works have a tangled textual history, so I'd advise going with these professional selections and no other (two editions of Shelley's complete works are finally in progress, I'm happy to say).
Pure Intellectual Beauty Shelley is the wild child of English poetry and his determined opposition to tyranny produced a huge variety of poetry, ranging from the rending lament of Keats in Adonais, to the defiant and taut sonnet Ozymandias. His single greatest work, however, is Prometheus Unbound, which a vast gothic ruin of neat poetry. One shot of it and you'll wonder why a) all the nice, obvious prosy bits seem to have been left out and b) why exactly you love it, and him, so much. Like a cross between a vision of God and a lobotomy.
It's strange, but he means it and the grand sweep of the poem and its rebirth of humanity (I did say this isn't kitchen sink drama) is as distinctive an experience as reading Milton for the first time or the first time you read a love letter in the bath. Holding an electric fire.
There are many other poems which should be headline news, such as Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, Mont Blanc, Mutability and Ode to the West Wind, but this edition also has the advantage of including the Defence of Poetry which is the most rhapsodic and emotive arguments you'll ever have the pleasure to be swept away by. For a second you want to believe the beautiful nonsense that 'poets are the unackowledged legislators of the world'. Shelley pulls no punches in prose because he hasn't pulled any in poetry. He believes in the prophetic importance of his role and is electric enough to almost make us belive him.
This is the best student edition of Shelley's works in print. Not according to me, but to a Professor in Romantic Poetry at Oxford University. Not a bad recommendation!
The essays in this volume are generally helpful and explain the structures of the poems where useful. They are also refreshingly short. Shelley is a poet who has run close to obscurity due to reams of bad criticism (by figures as famous as Matthew Arnold and FR Leavis) who have mistaken his extraordinary originality for weakness. An easy mistake, I'm sure. Shelley's poetry is all in the mind, and the lack of concreteness can be frustrating. A bit like flying can be so much more tiresome than walking.
Indispensable If you only buy one book of Shelley's works -- make it this one.
This edition contains all Shelley's major poetry, as well as three essays (see table of contents on this page).
The bonus is that, as this is a critical edition, it also contains 15 brief critical essays, which are among the best explications you'll find of Shelley's work. (Since it's a critical edition, the poems are also heavily footnoted, something you'll either love or hate.)
The only downside is that a number of Shelley's shorter and lighter poems are absent (e.g., "Love's Philosophy"), and only a small portion of "Laon and Cyntha" appears here -- but overall the selection is solid. And, like all the Norton critical editions, this is printed on decent paper, eye-straining, tissue-thin stock found in some other volumes.
Perfect for those new to Shelley as well as long-time devotees.
Anything Goes Trivia
Trevor
Megaton Man
