In 2000, editor Neil Fraistat used an epigraph from Julian and Maddalo to dedicate the inaugural volume of The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley to his children, "wonder[s] of this earth, / Where there is little of transcendent worth." Not until now, however, has the Johns Hopkins edition of this poem appeared. Volume Four is the fifth of a projected eight volumes, with Fraistat as the surviving founding editor. (Volume Seven, which contains Shelley's late masterpiece The Triumph of Life along with many of his most celebrated lyrics, was published out of sequence in 2021.) The rival Longman Annotated English Poets edition of Shelley had its sixth and final installment in 2024, thirty-five years after that project was launched and some fifty years after it was conceived. More than half complete after a mere quarter of a century, the JHUP Shelley is thus on track to catch up.

In addition to Julian and Maddalo (edited by Nora Crook), the poems included here are among Shelley's most widely varying in tone, form, subject, and motivation. Whereas the Longman edition presents the poems in order of their composition, the JHUP follows the order of their "release," understood as not only publication in the strict sense but, more broadly, the timeline of their distribution to others. It follows from this principle that there is a hierarchy of potential copy-texts, starting with the first lifetime edition of a poem (where one exists), down to Shelley's most advanced fair-copy. This expansive conception of "release" is judicious because, as this volume again makes clear, publication was often a fraught affair for Shelley. He frequently shared his poems with interlocking associations of friends, lovers (actual and potential), amanuenses, rivals, and collaborators, even when "mankind" ("Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth / Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!" ["Ode to the West Wind," 1819]) was destined to wait much longer for them. This volume thus gathers texts first read in the years 1818 and 1819, with some forays into 1820 on the grounds that Shelley circulated earlier poems during that year.

The volume is, fittingly, dedicated to the memory of Stuart Curran. His editions of Rosalind and Helen, The Cenci, Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills, and The Mask of Anarchy are all included here. His Shelley's "Cenci": Scorpions Ringed with Fire (1970) remains the standard study of that work, and Shelley's Annus Mirabilis (1975) addresses the extraordinary achievement of the period 1819--20. Curran was working until the spring before his death in late 2024--untimely and unexpected, despite the seniority of his years--concluding a towering career in scholarship of the Romantic period and, especially, of Shelley. I vividly remember him leaning into the microphone during the 2008 conference of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism in Bologna to pronounce Shelley the greatest English poet since Milton. The volume is also benignly haunted by another magisterial scholar and founding editor of the JHUP Shelley--Donald Reiman, who passed in 2019. The editions of Julian and Maddalo and Athanase, we are told, owe a debt to Reiman's unfinished work on those poems.

The wide range of ends to which Shelley directed his extraordinary creative energies in a concentrated period are well represented here. Rosalind and Helen is a first extended attempt at a conversational poem; and Julian and Maddalo, one of the best poems of the Romantic period, is the brilliant, urbane culmination of the conversational mode in the distinctly Shelleyan vein. Each reading of The Cenci confirms all the more strongly (at least for this reader) that it is the masterpiece of English tragic verse drama after Shakespeare. In the notes to his edition of Peter Bell the Third, Stephen Behrendt rightly highlights its sheer virtuosity. We are reminded that Richard Holmes described The Mask of Anarchy as "the greatest poem of political protest ever written in English." The long and editorially complex fragment Athanase (edited by Crook) is also included, as is a host of shorter poems (Behrendt, Crook) by turns plangent and affecting, scurrilous and insulting, and sometimes all at once.

I do have to concur in the relatively low ranking Rosalind and Helen is accorded among Shelley's mature poems. This is despite a number of memorable passages, such as the speculation that the spirits of the deceased might partake of the environment in which they are buried, or the recollected vision of a world in which "truth and love shall dwell below / Among the works and ways of man," or the lovely late description of "the noon of autumn's glow." Perhaps it suffers by comparison with the subsequent Julian and Maddalo, one of the great conversational poems of English literature. Shelley, I imagine, might have accepted such an estimation. Something similar affects Athanase, Shelley's first sustained attempt at terza rima, one of the earliest revivals of that form in English after Milton, and possibly its first-ever deployment in English for a third-person narrative. Its preponderance of run-on tercets also gives Athanase, as George Saintsbury noted long ago, a verse-texture quite different from that of Dante's Commedia, the apotheosis of terza rima. Granted, Shelley would come to master the form more completely than he had here (this edition, among other things, thoroughly documents Shelley's struggles with the composition of Athanase), first in Ode to the West Wind and then, of course, in The Triumph of Life, one of the greatest, darkest, most unfathomable achievements of English verse.

It is perhaps the shorter poems included in this volume that lie along the widest spectrum of Shelley's poetic capabilities and modes. At one extreme are the amatory lyrics he sent to Sophia Stacey and, as far as it is possible to tell, intended to be set to music, as many of them subsequently were. At the other, we have the searing-hot invectives addressed to Sidmouth, Castlereagh, and Eldon, all unpublishable in their day for fear of prosecution. It is true that the vision of erotically charged, harmonious mingling in the poem usually known as "Love's Philosophy"--"What are all these kissings worth, / If thou kiss not me?"--is starkly different from the implacable enmity announced in the curses of "To [the Lord Chancellor]." In her commentary, however, Crook astutely reminds us of Shelley's praise for the minor verse of the Greek erotic poets in A Defence of Poetry, his 1821 response to Thomas Love Peacock. What those ancient poets did was to keep alive a "sensibility to pleasure, passion and natural scenery," the destruction of which would have represented "the last triumph of evil." While no critiques of the outrages of the ruling class, Shelley's lyrics for Sophia Stacey were also, Crook observes, "attempts at thwarting" such a triumph. Elsewhere, the edition gathers significant supplements to the main texts--for instance, Crook gives us three versions of "Love's Philosophy"-- allowing the reader a sense of Shelley's compositional as well as distributional practices.

The scholarship throughout the volume is meticulous, intelligent, and suggestive. In addition to the carefully prepared texts, the invaluable collations, and the editorial overview, the commentaries are rich in wisdom and reference an extraordinary range of scholarship--some of it current and some unjustly fallen of late into neglect. We learn here, for instance, about the plausibility of nineteenth-century accounts of the spread of nightingales in southern England; about where, precisely, among the Euganean hills Shelley's lines were most likely conceived; and about the place in English legal history of the Chancery Court judgment against Shelley. With enviable erudition, the editors relate Shelley's poems intimately to the long history of English and European literature and culture. This is a volume of really estimable breadth and depth. It marks a significant juncture not just in an essential edition but in the reception of Shelley's poetry as such.

Ross Wilson is Professor of the History and Theory of Criticism and Fellow of Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge.