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Title details for The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley - The Original Classic Edition by Emereo Pty Ltd - Wait list

The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley - The Original Classic Edition

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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. 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 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_.
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Publisher: Emereo Pty Ltd

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  • Release date: March 8, 2012

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  • File size: 3930 KB
  • Release date: March 8, 2012

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Classic Literature Fiction Literature Poetry

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English

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. 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 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_.
Expand title description text
Classic Literature Fiction Literature Poetry