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.
About the Author: The Editors
Michael Rossington is Professor of Romantic Literature at Newcastle University, UK.
Jack Donovan was formerly Reader in English at the University of York, UK.
Kelvin Everest is A. C. Bradley Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Liverpool, UK.
The General Editors
Paul Hammond, FBA, is Professor of Seventeenth-Century English Literature at the University of Leeds, UK.
David Hopkins is Emeritus Professor of English Literature and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Bristol, UK.
The Founding General Editor
F. W. Bateson, who founded the series and acted as General Editor for its first generation of titles, was a distinguished critic and scholar. He was lecturer in English and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, the editor of the original Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, and founding editor of the journal Essays in Criticism.
