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 Determined to hasten that day, she recovered his unpublished and uncollected poems and sifted through his surviving notebooks and papers.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 new volume of JHU Press's landmark Shelley edition contains posthumous poems edited from original manuscripts.

About the Author

Nora Crook is professor emerita of English literature at Anglia Ruskin University. Neil Fraistat is professor emeritus of English at the University of Maryland and the president of the Keats-Shelley Association of America.

Reviews
Rigorously, enthusiastically, and innovatively edited, this volume has brought excitement and zest to my Shelley-reading life.
-Australian Book Review
With volume seven raising the bar once again, this series is the gold standard for Shelley scholarship. Its expert and illuminating readings are peerless.
-Madeleine Callaghan, University of Sheffield, The Coleridge Bulletin
CPPBS 7 is set to become a model for editing modern poetry manuscripts. It strikes a difficult balance between philological rigor and scholarly comprehensiveness on the one hand and readability and usability at different levels of expertise on the other. Textual critics and students of Shelley's poetry will find it equally indispensable, but it will also serve as an important reference work for Mary Shelley scholars.
-Valentina Varinelli, Universita Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy, European Romantic Review
This outstanding installment of an epoch-making edition of Shelley's verse will transform the opportunities afforded to emerging Shelley scholars.
-Anthony Howe, Birmingham City University, UK, Review of English Studies
...this volume is a triumph, it is breathtaking, it is monumental, it is a summa.
-Byron Journal
Quite possibly the most significant publication among this year's Romantic studies,The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Volume Seven, edited by Nora Crook, is a magisterial scholarly edition of Shelley's posthumously published poems, including "The Triumph of Life" and many other fragments that Mary Shelley first edited, including some of his most beloved shorter lyrics. Part of the ongoing editorial project now directed by Crook and Neil Fraistat, Volume Seven arrives as a stunning and indispensable book, modeling both textual stewardship and critical acumen.
-Studies in English Literature 1500-1900
Exciting revelations, new connections, and editorial discoveries abound in volume seven, which is testament to the brilliance of one of our greatest scholars and editors of the Shelleys, Nora Crook.
-Keats-Shelley Review



Book Information
ISBN 9781421437835
Author Percy Bysshe Shelley
Format Hardback
Page Count 1040
Imprint Johns Hopkins University Press
Publisher Johns Hopkins University Press
Weight(grams) 1520g
Dimensions(mm) 235mm * 156mm * 60mm