The magnificent collection of "Shelley and His Circle" manuscripts in the Carl H. Pforzheimer Library is one of our finest sources for the English Romantic movement. This edition presents the more than 450 manuscripts from 1772 to 1822, over half of them by Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Volumes I and II include a first accurate printing of Shelley's letters to Thomas Hogg during a crucial period of his life; another series of letters records a struggle between Forman and Silsbee for acquisition of Shelley's papers that was the background for Henry James's Aspern Papers; Thomas Love...

The publication of Volumes III and IV of Shelley and His Circle under the editorial auspices of Kenneth Neill Cameron makes 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 Volumes I and II, which received the critical acclaim of, among others, John Ciardi, who lauded Cameron and his contributing editors for rescuing "the material from felonious footnotery primarily by enclosing it in a continuous narrative that contains detailed introductions to each of the characters of the...

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...

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...

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....

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...