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. In this volume, the editors have selected the most popular, significant and frequently taught poems from the six-volume Longman Annotated edition of Shelley’s poems. Each poem is fully annotated, explained and contextualised, along with a comprehensive list of abbreviations, an inclusive bibliography of material relating to the text and interpretation of Shelley’s poetry, plus an extensive chronology of Shelley’s life and works. Headnotes and footnotes furnish the personal, literary, historical and scientific information necessary for an informed reading of Shelley’s richly varied and densely allusive verse, making this an ideal anthology for students, classroom use, and anyone approaching Shelley’s poetry for the first time; however the level and extent of commentary and annotation will also be of great value for researchers and critics.
Contents
Title Page
Preface
Chronological Table of Shelley’s Life and Publications
Abbreviations
The Poems
1 Stanzas. — April, 1814
2 ‘O! there are spirits of the air’
3 To Wordsworth
4 Mutability
5 Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude
6 Verses written on receiving a Celandine in a letter from England
7 Hymn to Intellectual beauty
8 Mont Blanc. Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni
9 Ozymandias
10 To Constantia (‘Thy voice, slow rising like a Spirit, lingers’)
11 Sonnet (‘Lift not the painted veil which those who live’)
12 The Two Spirits. An Allegory
13 Lines Written among the Euganean Hills. October, 1818
14 Stanzas written in dejection — December 1818, near Naples
15 Prometheus Unbound
16 Julian and Maddalo
17 To Night
18 The Mask of Anarchy
19 Ode to Heaven
20 To S[idmouth] and C[astlereagh]
21 England in 1819
22 Ode to the West Wind
23 On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci, In the Florentine Gallery
24 Love’s Philosophy
25 ‘Thou art fair, and few are fairer’
26 To —— ("I fear thy kisses, gentle maiden’)
27 On a Dead Violet: To ——
28 Goodnight
29 ‘What men gain fairly, that they should possess’
30 An Exhortation
31 Song: To the Men of England
32 To —— (‘Corpses are cold in the tomb’)
33 The Sensitive-Plant
34 To —— [Lines to a Reviewer]
35 ‘Arethusa arose’
36 ‘Arethusa was a maiden’
37 ‘God save the Queen!’ [A New National Anthem]
38 Song (‘Rarely, rarely comest thou’)
39 Song of Apollo
40 Song of Pan
41 The Cloud
42 Evening. Ponte a Mare, Pisa
43 Letter to Maria Gisborne
44 To a Sky-Lark
45 To —— [the Lord Chancellor]
46 To —— [Lines to a Critic]
47 The Witch of Atlas
48 Sonnet: Political Greatness
49 ‘Ye hasten to the [grave]! What seek ye there?’
50 ‘Rose leaves, when the rose is dead’ [To —— (‘Music, when soft voices die’)]
51 Epipsychidion
52 A Lament (‘O World, O Life, O Time’)
53 ‘When passion’s trance is overpast’
54 Adonais
55 The Aziola
56 Written on hearing the news of the death of Napoleon
57 The Indian Girl’s Song
58 Autumn: a Dirge
59 ‘The flower that smiles today’ [Mutability]
60 ‘A widowed bird sate mourning for her love’
61 ‘Art thou pale for weariness’
62 To — (‘The serpent is shut out from Paradise’)
63 To Jane. The invitation
64 To Jane — The recollection
65 ‘Swifter far than summer’s flight’ / Remembrance [A Lament]
66 ‘When the lamp is shattered’ [Lines]
67 ‘One word is too often profaned’
68 With a guitar. To Jane
69 The magnetic lady to her patient
70 The Triumph of Life
71 To Jane (‘The keen stars were twinkling’)
72 ‘Bright wanderer, fair coquette of Heaven’ [Lines Written in the Bay of Lerici]
Index of Titles
Index of First Lines
Biography
Kelvin Everest is Emeritus Bradley Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Liverpool. He has published extensively on English Romantic poetry, including book-length studies of Coleridge and Keats, several edited collections of essays, and numerous articles and chapters. He is the co-editor of the Complete Poems of Shelley in the Longman Annotated English Poets series. His most recent monograph is Keats and Shelley: Winds of Light, published by Oxford University Press in 2021.
'This new Shelley: Selected Poems offers the outstanding editorial expertise and critical acumen of the complete Longman Poems in a single judiciously organized volume. It will be of great interest to everyone who cares about one of the most challenging of Romantic poets.'
Professor William Keach, Emeritus Professor, Brown University, USA
