The Esdaile Poems (Collected Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley)

Customer Reviews:

Great for what it is.......2005-05-04

If you are looking for a comprehensive collection of Shelley's poetry, this is not the volume to purchase. For that, I would recommend the Modern Library edition, the Oxford Major Works edition, or the Norton selection. This pocket edition, however, is wonderful for several reasons. First, it includes a generous selection of some of Shelley's best-loved works. Second, the publication itself is high quality. And third, the pocket size allows you to take Shelley along as the perfect companion in your day to day travels or when you're amongst nature. As long as you know what you're buying here (not a complete edition), I don't think you'll be disappointed.

One-dimensional selection, in Victorian confection.......2001-10-18

Suppose someone published a Shakespeare selection, that included pretty set pieces from the plays ("Queen Mab! What's she?" from _Romeo and Juliet_, "I know a bank whereon the wild thyme grows" from _Midsummer Night's Dream_), bits of _The Rape of Lucrece_ and _Venus and Adonis_, every last one of the "Sonnetf to Sundrie Notef of Mufic_, and a few songs: "It was a lover and his lass," and the like. But anything that hinted at a darker worldview or Shakespeare's wider range was ruthlessly excluded.

And suppose further that this anthology claimed that it represented Shakespeare's best work, showing his range and the things that make that writer great. So that anyone who knew Shakespeare through that anthology would think that he was good for the odd flower poem and a bit of "Hey nonny nonny" but not much else besides.

Isobel Quigly's _Shelley: A Selection_ is the Shelleyan equivalent of that Shakespeare anthology. Thus, Shelley's epic philosophical drama _Prometheus Unbound_, both a meditation about the relationship between thought and language and a metaphor for political renewal based on moral growth (among other things), is represented by a couple of incidental lyrics; all complexity and depth are left on Quigly's cutting room floor. _Julian and Maddalo_, with its urbanity, its bitter wit, crisp dialogue and vivid characterisation, is represented by one short purple passage (admittedly a splendid one) describing sunset over the Euganean hills.

The satirical Shelley is not represented at all: the contemptuous handling of contemporary political figures in the energetically grotesque _Oedipus Tyrannus_ is missing in action, as is the more nuanced satire of _Peter Bell the Third_. Oh, and the real Shelley may have been passionately engaged in the real world, protesting poverty, war and oppression in general and by specifics, in hard detail and in words of fire: but you won't find a hint of that in Quigly's selection. Many of Shelley's finest poems are simply omitted. _The Mask of Anarchy_ , _Song to the Men of England_, _Similes for Two Political Characters_, _Feelings of a Republican on Hearing the Death of Napoleon_, for example, and much else besides: Quigly won't trouble you with a word of it.

What she gives instead is every "pretty" poem Shelley ever wrote. That includes great lyrics like the _Ode to the West Wind_ and _To a Skylark_ and others, but also all the poems Shelley dashed off as gifts to women friends, often for them to use as song lyrics, and often written to fit existing tunes. These became enormously popular anthology pieces in the Victorian period, though Shelley himself showed little interest in them and never bothered to publish them.

It's not that these are bad poems. All are good of their kind, and many conceal a hard metaphysical kernel under a candied surface: _When the lamp is shattered_, and _Music when soft voices die_, for example. Shelley was in a sense more of a metaphysical than a romantic poet, and in another sense more of a metaphysical poet than the metaphysicals themselves, since he was often concerned with genuine metaphysical questions in his poetry: thought and language, epistemology, and so on.

But [...] Shelley is a minor and one-dimensional poet on the basis of this selection. But it's the selection at fault, not the poet.

Quigly also, irritatingly, strips poems of their contexts. She gives _Alastor_ and (surprisingly in view of its Dantean difficulties) _Epipsychidion_ complete, but rips away the prefaces that Shelley used, in each case, as part of his framing and distancing effect: they are important to the way in which the poem is to be presented, and to be approached.

She also follows the Victorians in getting various telling details wrong. Thus _The Indian Girl's Serenade_ is printed as _The Indian Serenade_; the change allowed the Victorians to treat the poem as a personal lyric rather than a performance piece, and to marvel over Shelley's exquisite but rather weak sensibility: "O lift me from the grass! I die, I faint, I fall!"

The name change conceals the fact that this poem was written for soprano performance (to a tune from Mozart's _La Clemenza di Tito_). Its charm is that it allows the performer opportunities to both use feminine wiles and at the same time mock them. The "faint" at the end of the song is best performed, by the singer, with one eye open to judge the effect. But Quigly knows nothing of this, referring to Shelley's "wholly personal love poems" in her wholly clueless introduction.

Quigly's introduction clearly places her as a late surviving Victorian, who has read a little Leavis and Elliot but nothing of the critical work done on Shelley up to this anthology's first publication date, which is 1956. Nothing has changed in this recent re-publication, despite the rich and fascinating work in Shelley criticism and Shelley studies in the years since Leavis. But Quigly wouldn't be the person to guide you through that material anyway.

I recommend the Norton Selection of Shelley's poetry and prose instead, with a much better and wider selection, and intelligent introduction and notes. And it's quite reasonable to want the romantic (in the Valentine's Day sense) Shelley, though that is only one side of a multi-faceted poet of astounding technical skill, sophistication and range: but for that side of Shelley I'd recommend Richard Hughes' _Shelley on Love_. Either selection is far better than this vapid and misleading collection of prettiana.

Cheers!

Laon
PS Also avoid Penguin's Poet to Poet series' Shelley entry. 20th century poetaster Kathryn Raine's Shelley selection is if anything slighter than Quigly's.

Wonderful, but slightly one dimensional.......2001-09-29

Shelly was a master at combining images and creating a world that was uniquley his own. The problem is, that world seemed to consist mainly of foggy sea shores at sunrise and forest cathedrals. While there is nothing wrong with visiting such a world, there is very little reason to stay there.

Shelly's lyrics are uneven, sometimes resorting to rhymes that make me cringe. His strength is iambic prose. Even this suffers from what appears to be a limited vocabulary which para doxically inclused eccentric spellings like "aery".

Having said all that, I must admit that I am in sypmpathy with Shelly. He dwells in a solitary world of fairy beauty that is the spiritual home of every soul in search of Truth. This goes a long way toward forgiving his somewhat middle ground talent.

"Queen Mab" and "Alastor" are the best peoms in this collection. Most of the other seem to be either comments or footnotes to these. They encompass Shelly's strange universe beautifully.

"Alastor" is the strongest in terms of imagery reflecting isolation and the hard choice to foresake worldy pleasure to find a higher truth. All sorts of moonlit coves lie just past the crashing waves of the main stream. One only wishes that Shelly could see the beauty he was leaving was a part of what he sought.

I recomment this edition, and the critical essay at its beginning, as a starting point for study of Shelly and his work.

Excellent Shelly Collection.......2000-05-09

I very much enjoyed this collection. It introduced me to the poignant poetry of one of the greatest English Romantic writers. Shelly is a poet you will most likely be required to read at some point in your life. If not, you would be doing a serious diservice to yourself to not seek to indulge in his writings by your own accord. "Song to the Men of England" is perhaps my favourite Shelly poem, despite the fact that it illustrates the utter hypocrisy of English aristocrats. This collection is bound beautifully, and includes all of the poems Shelly was famous for. It is priced reasonably, so there should therefore be no reason for you not to pick it up!

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Complete Poems of Keats and Shelley
John Keats
Manufacturer: Modern Library
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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The Complete Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Modern Library)

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Best Available, Despite Flaws
Best Available, Despite Flaws
Buyer beware!
if you're looking for Shelley - this is THE ONE

The Complete Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Modern Library)
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Manufacturer: Modern Library
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

ASIN: 0679601112
Release Date: 1994-06-14

Download Description

Percy Bysshe Shelley endures today as the great Promethean bard of the High Romantic period who is best remembered for extolling the sublime and affirming the possibility of transcendence.

Customer Reviews:

Best Available, Despite Flaws.......2002-05-21

This edition reprints the Shelley portion of the old Modern Library Giants volume, The Complete Poems of Keats and Shelley (who made a rather odd couple, but were nowhere near as mismatched as William Blake and John Donne, stars of a companion Giants volume).
Because Keats wrote about 450 (standard print) pages of poetry in his short life, and Shelley in his slightly longer time wrote close to a thousand - not counting his various prefaces and lengthy notes, as well as the interesting commentary of his first editor, and widow, Mary Shelley, which all previous editions had retained - it should come as no surprise that the capacity of even a Giants volume was strained, and compromises had to be made.
The compromises all hit Shelley, as the more prolific and perennially less popular of the two poets: many early poems, and some of the more fragmentary lyrics and translations were simply left out; the remaining juvenilia, including the long poem Queen Mab, were printed in double column format (with so many carry-over lines that you wonder why), as was a mid-length poem of his maturity, Rosalind and Helen. Shelley's notes to Queen Mab and some other prose, mostly connected with the early poems, were also omitted.
The Giant edition, even with these sacrifices made, was still longer than War and Peace. If one accepts that putting almost all the works of Shelley and Keats together in one volume is a desirable thing, then it has to be admitted this was a pretty decent way to do it. As it was an inexpensive commercial edition, it didn't go out of its way to better the established texts of rival editions (dating back to around 1900).
Modern Library later re-released the contents in separate Shelley and Keats volumes that have remained in print to this day; the ML Shelley was the only (fairly) modern, (mostly) complete, (generally) readable - all rival editions were double-column - edition available during the 70s, 80s, 90s; with the single exception of the Oxford University Press edition that was aborted after two volumes (covering the poems up to about 1816), and cost about a zillion dollars per book.
Today there are two expertly-edited, impressively over-annotated complete versions in the works: one American, one British. The American edition has only one volume out (as of mid-2002), containing just the first 150 pages of his poetry, and for about eighty American dollars. Shelley's greatness bloomed a bit late: the consistently readable poetry will only appear from volume 2 on; the great works will start around volume 4, at this rate. The British edition, by Longmans, costs well over a hundred dollars a volume, is not available..., and seems to only consist of a second volume at this time, representing Laon & Cythna through the Cenci (c.1817-1818). Both these volumes were published years ago; at this rate we should have rival perfectly-edited, entirely unaffordable complete editions of Shelley's entire poetical works by about 2015.
I give all this information to demonstrate that the Modern Library edition, -despite- reprinting inadequate texts of The Triumph of Life and Laon & Cythna / The Revolt of Islam, -despite- omitting the famous notes to Queen Mab (so much better than the poem), -despite- printing some material in hideous double columns...
...is the best volume of this great author's works available.

Best Available, Despite Flaws.......2002-05-21

This edition reprints the Shelley portion of the old Modern Library Giants volume, The Complete Poems of Keats and Shelley (who made a rather odd couple, but were nowhere near as mismatched as William Blake and John Donne, stars of a companion Giants volume).
Because Keats wrote about 450 (standard print) pages of poetry in his short life, and Shelley in his slightly longer time wrote close to a thousand - not counting his various prefaces and lengthy notes, as well as the interesting commentary of his first editor, and widow, Mary Shelley, which all previous editions had retained - it should come as no surprise that the capacity of even a Giants volume was strained, and compromises had to be made.
The compromises all hit Shelley, as the more prolific and perennially less popular of the two poets: many early poems, and some of the more fragmentary lyrics and translations were simply left out; the remaining juvenilia, including the long poem Queen Mab, were printed in double column format (with so many carry-over lines that you wonder why), as was a mid-length poem of his maturity, Rosalind and Helen. Shelley's notes to Queen Mab and some other prose, mostly connected with the early poems, were also omitted.
The Giant edition, even with these sacrifices made, was still longer than War and Peace. If one accepts that putting almost all the works of Shelley and Keats together in one volume is a desirable thing, then it has to be admitted this was a pretty decent way to do it. As it was an inexpensive commercial edition, it didn't go out of its way to better the established texts of rival editions (dating back to around 1900).
Modern Library later re-released the contents in separate Shelley and Keats volumes that have remained in print to this day; the ML Shelley was the only (fairly) modern, (mostly) complete, (generally) readable - all rival editions were double-column - edition available during the 70s, 80s, 90s; with the single exception of the Oxford University Press edition that was aborted after two volumes (covering the poems up to about 1816), and cost about a zillion dollars per book.
Today there are two expertly-edited, impressively over-annotated complete versions in the works: one American, one British. The American edition has only one volume out (as of mid-2002), containing just the first 150 pages of his poetry, and for about eighty American dollars. Shelley's greatness bloomed a bit late: the consistently readable poetry will only appear from volume 2 on; the great works will start around volume 4, at this rate. The British edition, by Longmans, costs well over a hundred dollars a volume, is not available on Amazon, and seems to only consist of a second volume at this time, representing Laon & Cythna through the Cenci (c.1817-1818). Both these volumes were published years ago; at this rate we should have rival perfectly-edited, entirely unaffordable complete editions of Shelley's entire poetical works by about 2015.
I give all this information to demonstrate that the Modern Library edition, -despite- reprinting inadequate texts of The Triumph of Life and Laon & Cythna / The Revolt of Islam, -despite- omitting the famous notes to Queen Mab (so much better than the poem), -despite- printing some material in hideous double columns...
...is the best volume of this great author's works available.

Buyer beware!.......2001-08-12

This disgraceful edition calls itself the "Complete Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley". It is nothing of the kind.

Much of Shelley's work was suppressed by 19th century editors, poems such as "A Ballad" for example. The poem, beginning "Young Parson Richards stood at his gate", was one of the poems Shelley intended for his projected "Popular Songs" volume, political poems in simple language to be sold amongst workers and their families in England. "A ballad" concerns religious hypocrisy, prostitution and starvation.

Standard editions of Shelley still suppress this poem, 218 years after it was written.

Shelley's first editor, Mary Shelley had no choice about censoring Shelley's more radical poems: she was dependent on Shelley's father Sir Timothy Shelley, for 150 pounds a year that was the different between survival and starvation for herself and her son. And Sir Timothy wanted his dead son, that shameful atheist, democrat and philanthropist, forgotten. Mary Shelley was under financial threat if she preserved her late husband's memory, and in that context her work as editor was brave and loyal.

Let's not forget that people went to jail, during the early and mid-19th century, for publishing Shelley's works: Chartist and other working class and radical publishers.

But by the cusp of the 20th century, Shelley's Victorian editors had no such excuses: and they were neither brave nor loyal. They _could_ have produced a genuinely complete works, but they chose not to. They wanted to give the world a harmless Shelley, a "beautiful and ineffectual angel", as Matthew Arnold called him, and they were prepared to suppress and distort Shelley's works to help preserve that image.

But - amazingly - here we are in the 21st century, and this edition appears. And not only does it perpetuate the various omissions of Shelley's 19th century editors/suppressors (why is _Laon and Cythna_ still appearing in its bowdlerised form as _The Revolt of Islam_?), but THIS EDITION ACTUALLY DELETES CONTROVERSIAL SHELLEY MATERIAL THAT EVEN THE VICTORIANS HAD THE COURAGE TO PRINT.

So if you buy this edition, you'll find many Shelley poems missing, as you will if you buy the Oxford edition of Shelley's Poetical Works. But in this edition you will also find that the notes to _Queen Mab_ have disappeared. Why? The notes to _Queen Mab_ are as integral a part of the poem as Elliot's Notes to _The Wasteland_. The reason is not space, or that the notes are prose. If prose was the problem, why not remove the long prefaces to several of the longer works, or the notes to _Hellas_, or Mrs Shelley's notes?

The reason, clearly, is that Shelley's opinions, as expressed in the notes ot _Queen Mab_ are still controversial. The atheism and the defence of religious freedom including freedom from religion, his hatred of his government's military adventures, his views on marriage, on prostitution, his proto-socialism, are still capable of offending the sort of committee that gets books pulled from libraries, especially school libraries.

And sadly, it seems that there are still publishers who believe that people should be protected from the knowledge that Shelley was a radical, a controversialist on the side of the weak, the poor and powerless, an activist some of whose messages would see him in trouble, still, with those in power today.

Not everyone who buys Shelley _wants_ Shelley the controversialist, of course. He is perhaps the supreme English lyric poet, a poet of nature and of light, idealism and love. But even if you don't particularly want to read the notes to _Queen Mab_, and the other material missing from this volume, you may feel that censorship of a major English poet, whose work and thought should be part of all of our heritage, should not be rewarded or encouraged. Don't buy this edition. There is a complete edition coming, in four volumes, edited by Neil Fraistat. Unfortunately, at US$57 a volume, that will be out of many people's price ranges. However it can be hoped that Fraistat's edition will shame the several publishers of one-volume "Complete Poems" into ending the current censorship and suppression.

But this edition is a huge and disgraceful step _backwards_ in Shelley publishing: actually containing less than the already-inadequate Oxford Complete Poetry. In the meantime, I can only recommend that Shelley lovers buy the Oxford edition, if they can't afford the Fraistat.

No cheers on this one,

Laon (no relation)

if you're looking for Shelley - this is THE ONE.......1999-05-21

This is a fantastic collection of Shelley's work. The breadth, depth, and soul of the man is astounding; his love and invention endless. What truly defines this collection over others is Mary Shelley's presence running through it, providing vivid, incredibly poignant and grounded counterpoint to Shelley's flights of fancy.

To get a true sense of his gifts as a poet, you have to dig into the longer work - none of which you're going to find in the Norton Anthology of Poetry. Just another reason this book rocks.

Book Description

Treasury of 37 well-known and representative poems by great Romantic poet includes "Ode to the West Wind," "To a Skylark," "Adonais," "Ozymandias," "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," many more. Lists of titles and first lines.

Customer Reviews:

Inexpensive Introduction to a Challenging Poet - Shelley.......2005-05-29

This inexpensive Dover edition, Selected Poems - Percy Bysshe Shelley, offers a good introduction to Shelley's wide ranging poetry. These thirty-seven poems, arranged chronologically from 1814-1822, span about 125 pages. The large font makes for easy reading. No footnotes are provided.

I have read this Dover edition several times in the last several years as well as two other short selections of Shelley's poetry. Despite my growing familiarity with his poems, I still find Shelley to be decidedly more challenging than Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge, or Byron.

This increased difficulty is especially evident in Shelley's longer poems. Like me, many readers are likely to become initially disoriented and confused by Shelley's layered and embedded metaphors. Fortunately, with a bit of persistence, careful attention, and multiple readings, most readers will become proficient in unraveling, and appreciating, Shelley's intricate patterns of connected imagery.

This Dover edition includes six of these longer, more challenging poems (even the titles are lengthy): Lines Written among the Euganean Hills (1818), Julian and Maddalo: A Conversation (1818), The Mask of Anarchy - Written on the Occasion of the Massacre at Manchester (1819), Letter to Maria Gisborne (1820), Epipsychidion (1821) - Verses Addressed to the Noble and Unfortunate Lady, Emilia Viviani Imprisoned in the Convent of -----, and Adonais - An Elegy on the Death of John Keats, Author of Endymion, Hyperion, etc.

The remaining thirty-one poems range from a dozen lines to a couple pages. I suggest that the reader new to Shelley focus on shorter poems, reserving the longer excursions for later. The four poems Ozymandias, The Cloud, Ode to the West Wind, and To Night make a good starting point.

Life like a dome of many-colored glass .......2005-04-29

"Life like a dome of many colored glass stains the white radiance of eternity"

"If winter comes, can spring be far behind."

"My name is Oxymandias ,king of kings
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains.Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

This excellent collection contains many of the most well- known of Shelley's poems, including 'Ode to the West Wind' 'Oxymandias' ' The Cloud' 'Adonais' ' To a Skylark" "Written in Dejection, Near Naples" "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" "Sonnet" England in 1819"

It contains some of the intensely musical and visionary verse of one of the most wild and revolutionary English Romantics. Shelley never gripped my mind and heart as Wordworth has , but the undeniable beauty of some of his powerful lines sings in my mind ( and I believe will sing in the mind of most readers) to this day.

"O Wild West Wind ,thou Breath of Autumn's Being
Thou, from unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeting "

Best dollar you'll ever spend.......2002-08-05

Shelley is one of the greatest English-language poets the world has ever known. Contained in this Dover edition are some of the finest examples of his work: Ozymandias; his two poetic elegies, Lines Written among the Euganean Hills and Adonais; and his depiction of his relationship with Byron, Julian and Maddalo. These poems, and the others in this edition, offer an excellent introduction to Percy Shelley, and thus to Romanticism as a whole. This is the best dollar that you will ever spend.

The best of Shelley.......2000-06-08

This is a wonderful collection of Shelley's greatest poems. I checked it out of the library and was tempted never to return it.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Other Poems of the Romatic Era: Literary Touchstone Classic

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The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Other Poems of the Romatic Era: Literary Touchstone Classic
Samuel Taylor Coleridge , William Blake , William Wordsworth , Lord Byron George Gordon , Percy Bysshe Shelley , and John Keats
Manufacturer: Prestwick House, Inc.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Perfect Paperback

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All 4-for-3 Deals | 4-for-3 Books Store | Stores | Books
ASIN: 1580491715
Release Date: 2006-09-01

Product Description

This Prestwick House Literary Touchstone Classic includes a glossary and reader's notes to help the modern reader more fully appreciate the richness and unique vision of these Romantic innovators. When, in 1798, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and other Romantic poems were published in Lyrical Ballads, the book did not immediately capture the public's imagination. Today, however, most modern critics consider the collection extremely important and influential-it ushered in what came to be known as the English Romantic Era in poetry and moved from the contrived and intellectual poetic language of the Enlightenment to a celebration of the simple, the pure, and the natural. The poems in this anthology represent, not necessarily the most famous, but certainly the best poetry produced by the six great English Romantic poets-Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. These twenty-two poems reveal the heights of ecstatic inspiration, the depths of grief and utter desolation, and the ideologies of these mystics, revolutionaries, and free thinkers. Mini-biographies of the poets accompany their works and tell the stories of the fascinating, and often scandalous, lives of the modern world's first true literary celebrities

Alastar or the Spirit of Solitude and Other Poems

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Alastar or the Spirit of Solitude and Other Poems
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Manufacturer: Ams Pr Inc
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Alastor: Or, The Spirit of Solitude: And Other Poems (The Shelley Society's Publications: Second Series, Number 3)

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Alastor: Or, The Spirit of Solitude: And Other Poems (The Shelley Society's Publications: Second Series, Number 3)
Percy Bysshe; Dobell, Bertram (editor) Shelley
Manufacturer: Reeves and Turner ... And B. Dobell
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000LQVQ1U

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Thought they were a pain alive you're in for a real shock!

The best so far
Van Richten's Guide to the Walking Dead (Dungeons & Dragons d20 3.0 Fantasy Roleplaying, Ravenloft Setting)
Jackie Cassada
Manufacturer: Arthaus
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Cassada, Jackie | ( C ) | Authors, A-Z | Science Fiction & Fantasy | Subjects | Books
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Customer Reviews:

Thought they were a pain alive you're in for a real shock!.......2004-08-15

It's Ravenloft at it's finest and undead at it's prime. What could be worse than fighting against Ravenloft's custom undead creaters that stalk the night, haunt the forests, and hunt the living? Ravenloft answer making those undead stronger and giving you the ability to make your own Ravenloft undead monsters. This can be achieved through this book it gives you a comprehensive list of abilities, powers, and appearances that you can give to any character. So if you had a really nasty villian that you loved and your players recall with infamany you can bring em' back to the land of the living to scare the crap of them one more time in ways they would never see coming. I would recommend this book to any self respected horror fan, Ravenloft fan, and anyone gamer that wants a second chance at their players with their favorite villian.

The best so far.......2003-03-15

This is the best of the Ravenloft supplements so far. It gives a nice structure to the undead and some of the new creature concepts are very nice and will come in quite handy to add some terror in the campaign. Much of the information would work very well even outside of a strict Ravenloft setting. Keep up the good work.

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