Writing to his publisher in 1813, Shelley expressed the hope that two of his major works "should form one volume"; nearly two centuries later, the second volume of the Johns Hopkins edition of "The Complete Poetry" fulfills that wish for the first time. This volume collects two important pieces: "Queen Mab" and "The Esdaile Notebook." Privately issued in 1813, "Queen Mab" was perhaps Shelley's most intellectually ambitious work, articulating his views of science, politics, history, religion, society, and individual human relations. Subtitled "A Philosophical Poem: With Notes," it became his most influential--and pirated--poem during much of the nineteenth century, a favorite among reformers and radicals. "The Esdaile Notebook," a cycle of fifty-eight early poems, exhibits an astonishing range of verse forms. Unpublished until 1964, this sequence is vital in understanding how the poet mastered his craft.

As in the acclaimed first volume, these works have been critically edited by Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat. The poems are presented as Shelley intended, with textual variants included in footnotes. Following the poems are extensive discussions of the circumstances of their composition and the influences they reflect; their publication or circulation by other means; their reception at the time of publication and in the decades since; their re-publication, both authorized and unauthorized; and their place in Shelley's intellectual and aesthetic development.

This book introduces undergraduate and beginning graduate students to the field and provides them with a broad range of examples and materials for hands-on practice. Textual Editing and Criticism: An Introduction is concerned with both the history of the text and the aesthetic and political choices made in textual transmission. It is intended for courses concerned with questions of literary interpretation and value.

Volumes V and VI of Shelley and His Circle, edited by Donald H. Reiman, make available a further portion of the Shelley manuscript materials in the Carl H. Pforzheimer Library. These two volumes continue in the format and style of the preceding ones. They progress chronologically from late 1816 through 1819, tracing the growth of the poet's friendship with Leigh Hunt and his circle (including John Keats) and the blossoming of Shelley's poetic maturity. These volumes record the writing of The Revolt of Islam, Shelley's epic on the lessons of the French Revolution; the poet's journey to Italy; the deaths of his and Mary's two children; and his literary annus mirabilis in 1819. During this year he wrote Prometheus Unbound, The Cenci, and A Philosophical View of Reform, which is here presented in a corrected text. The sequence closes in late December 1819 with a series of letters that signal the beginning of Shelley's sense of isolation from his English friends and publisher. Among the 175 manuscripts presented in full diplomatic transcription are 82 by Shelley and numerous others by Godwin, Hunt, and Byron, as well as important hitherto unpublished early letters by Edward John Trelawny, and letters and journals of Keats, Peacock, Mary Shelley, Claire Clairmont, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, and Edward E. Williams. An Appendix of eleven early letters and poems by Byron completes this set. Altogether, Shelley and His Circle will encompass a half-century of interconnected biographies and will capture the literary and intellectual tenor of the Romantic era.

A milestone in literary scholarship, the publication of the Johns Hopkins edition of "The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley" makes available for the first time critically edited clear texts of all poems and translations that Shelley published or circulated among friends, as well as diplomatic texts of his significant incomplete poetic drafts and fragments. Edited upon historical principles by Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat, the multi volume edition will offer more poems and fragments than any previous collective edition, arranged in the order of their first circulation. These texts are followed by the most extensive collations hitherto available and detailed commentaries that describe their contextual origins and subsequent reception. Rejected passages of released poems appear as supplements to those poems, while other poetic drafts that Shelley rejected or left incomplete at his death will be grouped according to either their publication histories or the notebooks in which they survive.

"Volume One" includes Shelley's first four works containing poetry (all prepared for publication before his expulsion from Oxford), as well as "The Devil's Walk" (circulated in August 1812), and a series of short poems that he sent to friends between 1809 and 1814, including a bawdy satire on his parents and "Oh wretched mortal," a poem never before published. An appendix discusses poems lost or erroneously attributed to the young Shelley.

"These early poems are important not only biographically but also aesthetically, for they provide detailed evidence of how Shelley went about learning his craft as a poet, and the differences between their tone and that of his mature short poetry index a radical change in his self-image... The poems in Volume I, then, demonstrate Shelley's capacity to write verse in a range of stylistic registers. This early verse, even in its most abandoned forays into Sensibility, the Gothic, political satire, and vulgarity--perhaps especially in these most apparently idiosyncratic gestures--provides telling access to its own cultural moment, as well as to Shelley's art and thought in general."--from the Editorial Overview

Volumes VII and VIII not only carry the chronological catalogue of relevant manuscripts into July 1820, but they also contain an important retrospective of recently acquired Shelley and Byron letters and literary manuscripts from their summer together in Switzerland in 1816 through the end of 1819. (Some eighty-five percent of the manuscripts appearing in these volumes were not known to exist when Volumes V-VI of Shelley and His Circle went to press.) Among these are Shelley's long letter to Peacock describing his first acquaintance with Byron and their trip together around Lake Geneva (hitherto published as two separate letters); the press-copy manuscripts of Byron's Beppo and Shelley's "Athanase: A Fragment"; letters of Henry Brougham and Madame de Stael that comment on Byron in Switzerland; numerous letters by Byron's Venetian mistresses; and letters charting the growth of Byron's attachment to Teresa Guiccioli. In volume VIII, the materials of 1820 include E. J. Trelawny's account and commonplace book of 1820-1822; letters by Keats and others mentioning him; hitherto established letters from Peacock and others relevant to Shelley's debt to a Bath upholstery firm; Shelley's annotations in copies of Godwin's Political Justice and Spinoza's Traclatus Theologico-Politicus; three newly discovered letters of Shelley to his Florentine banker, as well as other important letters by Shelley, Godwin, and Leigh Hunt; and a web of correspondence between Teresa Guiccioli and Byron while they carried on their affair from different apartments in the Palazzo Guiccioli. These primary materials, all meticulously transcribed (those in Italian and Latin also accompanied by full translations) are complemented by detailed commentaries on events, people, ideas, and problems reused by the manuscripts, as well as by the following major essays: "Shelley as Athanase" by Donald H. Reiman; "Countesses and Cobblers' Wives: Byron's Venetian Mistresses" by Doucet Devin Fischer; "Mixed Company: Byron's Beppo and the Italian Medley" by Jerome J. McGann; "Countess Guiccioli's Byron" by Doucet Devin Fischer; "Trelawny's Lost Years" by William St. Clair; and "Shelley and the Upholsterers of Bath" by Donald H. Reiman.