The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley ed. by Donald H. Reiman, Neil Fraistat, Nora Crook, Stuart Curran, Michael O’Neill, Michael J. Neth, and David Brookshire (review)

“And on the pedestal these words appear: / … / Nothing beside remains.” So used are we to this text of “Ozymandias” from Rosalind and Helen (1819), thence in Mary Shelley’s edition of 1839 (iii: 67), that the manuscript comes as a minor revelation: “And on the pedestal, this legend clear: / My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings, / Look on my Works ye Mighty, & and despair! / No thing remains beside.” “No thing” among “remains” does the work of evoking “nothing,” with a devastating chime against the boastful King, but gets added value from the way it verges on punning “remains” into a compatible noun. It’s a nice stage of Shelleyan thinking, one kept for the first publication in the Examiner (January 11, 1818). What Shelley let go was “legend clear.” Although the last phenomenological stop of this sonnet is about reading that survives and ironizes Ozymandian-authorial intention, Shelley preferred “words appear” as the “thing” that remains, as remains.

What of that sublime icon of “things,” Mont Blanc? In Shelley’s first version, the title is a blank, marked only “Scene—Pont Pellisier in the vale of Servox.” The final declaration (before the famously inconclusive closing question) we know from all publications as “The secret strength of things / Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome / Of heaven is as a law, inhabits thee!” The notebook reads “Of Heaven is as a column, rests on thee,”—no exclamation, and a simile with a concrete architecture that Shelley decided to revise into counter-juridical law, a power of inhabitation that could forgo the large code of a capital H.

Such discoveries marked my preliminary fun with this splendid addition to The Complete Poetry. The volume’s tent-poles are the radically visionary Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude: and Other Poems (1816) and the radically political Laon and Cythna; or, The Revolution of the Golden City (1817, revised in 1818 as The Revolt of Islam), though in Shelley’s poetic management such distinctions are arguable, the visionary romances shadowed by material disappointments, the political poems always energized by visionary prospects. No wonder: in the years covered in Volume iii, 1814 to March 1818, Europe reeled from the fall, resurgence, and final defeat of Napoleon, then a vigorous restoration of repressive monarchies, and England was rocked by post-war depression, desperate starvation, and the rise of working-class activism. Then there was the turmoil of Shelley’s personal life: he left his first wife when he fell in love and eloped with Mary Godwin; after the body of his first wife was discovered drowned, custody court denied him their children; his first child with Mary died within days of her birth and the next children William and Clara both died in childhood. They spent a remarkable summer with Byron on Lake Geneva in 1816. On December 1, an essay in The Examiner on “Young Poets” (by editor Leigh Hunt) called attention to “a very striking and original thinker. His name is PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, and he is the author of a poetical work entitled Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude.”

Volume iii curates the poetry that made Shelley “Shelley,” famous and infamous, poised for international fame. The major epic-lyric and epic endeavors have compelling fellow-travelers—not just occasional poems (a translated epigram of Plato, or “Verses written on receiving a Celandine in a letter from England,” or the result of a sonnet-competition with Keats and Hunt, “To The Nile”) but also the canon-destined Mont Blanc, “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” “To Wordsworth” (a distressed ambivalence about what he had been, and what he became, that issues a vigorous experiment with sonnet-form), and “Ozymandias,” now Shelley’s most internationally famous...