THE COMPLETE POETICAL WORKS OF PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY THE TEXT NEWLY COLLATED AND REVISED BY GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY BOSTON AND NEW YORK M DCCC XCII 19847 The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. PREFACE I HAVE undertaken in this edition to collect all the poems of Shelley, to ascertain and establish an authentic text for the ordinary reader and furnish the student with a view of its sources, variations, and suggested emendations, and to give in the NOTES the history of each poem. Shelley's text stands in need of such laborious editing, to a degree exceptional in the work of modern writers, owing to the fact that such poems as he prepared for the press were inaccurately printed, and that a large proportion of the whole was published after his death from confused and varying manuscripts. The personal judgment of the editor counts for so much in any edition that a variorum text is the only just and perfect rendering of his poetry that is now possible. Nevertheless, the reproduction of the originals, whether Shelley's own editions or his manuscripts or transcripts from them, need not be exact to the point of facsimile; and, with this view, it is here limited to what is material. |