Fragments of Shelley

The image you see here is a fragment from Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem "The Triumph of Life," left unfinished when he drowned on July 30th, 1822, a few days before his 30th birthday.  Shelley left behind a young son, Percy Florence, a widow, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and a considerable body of poetry. 

On May 4, 2021, a group of scholars and admirers of both Shelleys gathered online to celebrate a milestone in the editing of those poems: the appearance of Volume VII of The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley from the Johns Hopkins University Press, edited by Nora Crook. Participants in the Zoom event included the editor herself; her co-editor of the whole series, Neil Fraistat; Rachael Marsay, Roy Davids Archivist and Curator of Literary Manuscripts after 1800 at the Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford; Elizabeth Denlinger, Curator of the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle at The New York Public Library; and Catherine Goldstead, Associate Editor for Literary Studies and Ancient Studies at the Johns Hopkins University Press. 

If not for the pandemic, at least some of those people would have gathered in the flesh for a party, since this book, weighing in at an even thousand pages, labored at for over fifteen years, comprised of the most careful, knowledgeable, and insightful readings possible of P.B. Shelley's dreadful hand—this book deserves a party. 

You can watch the event below:

If you want to skip to the highlights,  you can hear Nora Crook read Shelley's lyric fragment "The Passage of the Apennines" at 33:27, and, at 37:41, hear how she made sense of two lines that had stumped her for thirty years. 

Volume VII is largely made up of  incomplete poems, "the fragments and the few complete but unpolished original poems that Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley includes in Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1824)." Crook is careful in her appellation of these shards of verse: "Except for those taken from fair copies we do not call these poems, but poetry, fragments, drafts, stanzas, lines, verses, items,  or pieces, as appropriate." Nonetheless, this volume contains some of Shelley's most enduring work, beginning with "The Triumph of Life," 548 terza rima lines that "many regard as his finest piece of poetry, despite its being a fragment, or perhaps because it is fragment." We find also some of Shelley's most beloved brief lyrics, such as "Music, When Soft Voices Die," and much more; to quote Crook again,  the "longer fragments 'Unfinished Drama,' 'Our boat is asleep on Serchio’s stream,' Charles the First, 'Ginevra,' 'Mazenghi,' and 'The Woodman and the Nightingale' ... represent his experimentation within dramatic, narrative, descriptive, and allegorical genres."

Crook has returned to Shelley's original manuscripts and made corrections to earlier editions; writing of "The Triumph of Life" she notes that "In spite of sixty years of close scrutiny of the MS by Matthews, Reiman, and many others, we have found need for further small corrections to current texts, as other editors will do after us. 'Figures ever new | Rise on the bubble, paint them how we may.'" Despite the extent of the scholarly apparatus, though, this book has been designed with such care that, while you might not want to toss it in your rucksack on your post-COVID backpacking trip, it is a pleasure to read at a table. The supplementary materials and scholarly apparatus are there to be consulted when needed, but they do not obtrude on the poems themselves on the page. For this the editors and designers at Hopkins are much to be commended. 

Turn to the back and you will find commentaries that amount to concise monographs on the most important fragments, notes on all poems, historical collations, some of P.B. Shelley's background reading, and much else. At the front of the volume, Nora Crook's editorial overview offers us a careful publishing history and a sympathetic reconsideration of Mary Shelley as editor, firmly countering the old image of her as prudish. Working within very tight constraints imposed by P.B. Shelley's father, who wished his son's work to be forgotten, and harsh English libel laws, the boundaries of which Shelley's more radical poetry skirted or surpassed, Mary Shelley was not able to publish as she wished. It would have been personally painful to her to know that some of her late husband's love lyrics were not addressed to her. And yet she did not give up the fight to keep alive his work and his name. One hundred and ninety-nine years after P.B. Shelley's death, Volume VII of The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley is a living monument to both him and his wife.