Shelley's Poetry and Prose: Authoritative Texts, Criticism (Norton Critical Edition) [Paperback]

Percy Bysshe Shelley (Author), Donald H. Reiman (Editor), Sharon B. Powers (Editor)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0393091643 | ISBN-13: 978-0393091649 | Publication Date: July 1977 | Edition: 1st

This volume contains one of the fullest, and certainly the most accurately edited, collections of Shelley's poetry and prose currently available. All the texts have been re-edited from primary sources especially for this edition.

All the poems and prose pieces have been thoroughly annotated, with unusual diction defined and with all biographical, historical, topographical, and literary allusions identified (many of them for the first time anywhere).

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Neil Fraistat is Professor of English at the University of Maryland and a founder and General Editor of the Romantic Circles website. He is co-editor of The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, of Textual Studies in the Late Age of Print, and of Helen Maria Williams' Letters Written in France. He is recipient of the Society for Textual Scholarship's Fredson Bowers Memorial Prize and the Keats-Shelley Association's Distinguished Scholar Award.


Donald H. Reiman, Adjunct Professor of English at the University of Delaware, is co-editor of Shelley and His Circle at the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection, New York Public Library. He is a director and officer of the Keats-Shelley Association of America, founder of the Wordsworth-Coleridge Association, a founding director of the Society for Textual Scholarship and the Byron Society of America, and a founder of the Romantic Circles website. He has written, edited, or co-edited some 200 volumes of literary and textual criticism.


--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 720 pages
• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc; 1st edition (July 1977)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393091643
• ISBN-13: 978-0393091649
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.1 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #621,121 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Indispensable, February 19, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Shelley's Poetry and Prose: Authoritative Texts, Criticism (Norton Critical Edition) (Paperback)

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.

49 of 54 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Pure Intellectual Beauty, June 8, 2000

By 

"thelessdeceived" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Shelley's Poetry and Prose: Authoritative Texts, Criticism (Norton Critical Edition) (Paperback)

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.

24 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Hero, July 12, 2005

By 

Crowley Fan - See all my reviews

This review is from: Shelley's Poetry and Prose (Norton Critical Edition) (Paperback)

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).