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Title: Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Vol. 1) by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Donald H. Reiman, Neil Fraistat ISBN: 0-8018-6119-5 Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ Pr Pub. Date: February, 2000 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $85.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (2 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: What Shelleyans have been waiting for; and still are.
Comment: This looks to be an excellent edition, and it's certainly a relief that Shelley is finally being presented complete and unaltered, and with an entourage of thousands of helpful notes.
I give only three stars to this particular volume, though, because it only presents about a hundred and fifty pages of actual Shelley; and, since Shelley made the jump from mediocrity to greatness only after writing quite a lot; and also considering how much time has already passed since this first volume came out: it will be quite a while before Reiman reaches the material worth paying money(per slim volume) for. The Longman version (pricier per volume, but each containing more) will most likely be complete a bit sooner.
So, I and all Shelley lovers wish this enterprise the best good luck; but might prefer its volumes (how many total? 7?) to be released in reverse order at this rate. For now we're stuck with the antiquated Modern Library edition for so many poems.
Rating: 5
Summary: At last! Shelley plain after 200 (or so) years!
Comment: The state of Shelley publishing has been one of the literary scandals of the last 200-odd years.
Mary Shelley, Shelley's widow and first editor, did her work under threat. Shelley's father Sir Timothy Shelley wanted his son's memory forgotten. Since Sir Timothy was paying a "pension" of 150 pounds a year to his son's widow and child, he was able to blackmail Mary Shelley out of writing a biography or issuing a complete works, by threatening to cut off her income. The readiness to starve his own grandson to strike at his dead son is villainy of the sort you'd expect to find in a Victorian novel, not in life. But there it was; the poet's father was a Bad Man, and no doubt part of the model for the occasional Bad Fathers (the Cenci, Jupiter etc) in Shelley's work.
So Mary Shelley's work, while Sir Timothy was still alive, publishing the most important poems with notes that collectively add up to a kind of biography, was an act of loyalty to her husband, and not without courage.
Her successors deserve less praise. Though occasionally ingenious in correcting details of text and recovering poems from notebook fragments, they betrayed Shelley. Some poems they deliberately omitted for their radicalism: the 1820 ballad, "Young Parson Williams", was one example. Other poems they left in a bowlerised state, in particular _Laon and Cythna_, published with its religious, sexual and political radicalism blunted as _The Revolt of Islam_. Still other poems were distorted, by carelessness (eg the missing stanza of _On the Head of the Medusa_, the missing lines in _Mont Blanc_) or by sentimentality.
A glaring example of sentimental distortion is the breaking off of the _Triumph of Life_ fragment at the line: " 'Then what is life,' I cried." Shelley's draft continues for four lines, showing that the dark vision of the procession of life, that has dominated the poem till this point, is to "roll" on and out of the poem. One section of the poem had ended and another was about to start. The whole poem, if it had been finished, probably involved a movement from despair into light in the manner of _Prometheus Unbound_. But the absence of those lines led many commentators to believe that the poem was intended to be only a statement of despair. (Rather as if we had Act I of _Prometheus Unbound_ but not the later sections of that poem.)
Also, Shelley wrote "I said", not "I cried". The Victorian editors substituted "cried" because "crying" gives us a properly "romantic" Shelley, less like the real, controlled artist. And "cried" furnished a spurious rhyme with "wayside" and "abide" in the lines above - though at the same time distorting Shelley's terza rima.
And stopping the poem at that dramatic point gave us another Victorian myth: the young poet, defeated by the Great Question and failing to find an answer in verse, plunges beneath the waves in search of final truth. A romantic suicide instead of a pointless accidental drowning (or quite possibly murder by an Italian fishing smack, intending piracy). Without digressing into the many reasons why the suicide story is nonsense, it can be observed in this context that distortion of Shelley's poetry inevitably leads to distortions of biography as well as of interpretation.
And there things have stood, for over 100 years. Oxford University Press could reasonably have claimed to be the guardian of Shelley's poetry, and they have failed their trust shamefully. Oxford began publishing a genuinely complete poetical works in the 1970s, edited by Neville Rogers. This project mysteriously stopped after just two of the projected four volumes. However none of Rogers' work on Shelley's poems up to 1817 has been incorporated into any of the one-volume Shelley editions, including Oxford's. Instead the unsatisfactory Victorian text, with all its distortions, bowdlerisations, suppressions, omissions and shoddinesses has been allowed to stand.
The first volume of this four-volume project gives us every reason to hope we will finally - after nearly 200 years - be able to read Shelley's poems without distortion, censorship or omission. This volume contains what would generally be considered to be Shelley's juvenilia: for example the intriguing mini-epic _The Wandering Jew_ in which Ahasuerus appears not as a monster but as a sympathetic character for one of the first times in European literature.
And we get the political passion and the outrageous parodies of the _Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson_. To get an idea of the sheer outrageousness of the _Posthumous Fragments_, imagine a contemporary poet publishing scurrilous satires and angry political poems as if they were written by John Hinckley (the guy who tried to assassinate Reagan), and smuggled out of his cell. Then imagine that one of the poems included an exchange between Che Guevera and Pattie Hearst, in which they sing, in short panting lines, of oral sex. That gets you some idea of the naughtiness, in 1810 terms, of the _Epithalamium for Francis Revaillac and Charlotte Corday_.
And Fraistat's notes on the poems, biographical and interpetative, are first-rate. There are places he can be argued with (for example the events - background to two verse letters that may be the worst poems of Shelley's life - concerning a possible affair between Shelley's mother and Fergus Graham, where I think Shelley had inside information and his interpretation can be taken seriously) but he never strays from evidence and his interpretations of events and of poems are always reasonable and insightful.
The next volume will bring us Shelley's first great poem, _Queen Mab_, also _Alastor_, the shorter poems_Mont Blanc_, and the _Hymn to Intellectual Beauty_, and perhaps the restored epic _Laon and Cythna_. This is a great project, and my only criticism is that it at least 100 years overdue. My absolute highest recommendation to Shelley readers. Note to Fraistat et al: More volumes please!
Cheers!
Laon (no relation)
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