The Poems of Shelley: Volume II
edited by Kelvin Everest and Geoffrey Matthews
Longman £95, pp879
Buy it at BOL

Hazlitt once said that Shelley 'has a fire in his eye, a fever in his blood, a maggot in his brain, and a hectic flutter in his speech, which mark out the philosophic fanatic'. Not the kind of remark that Shelleyans much like, but it catches the spirit of one of the most inspired and intellectually demanding of the Romantics.

Overshadowing his work, his extraordinary life has long been the stuff of novels, plays and films - he was husband to the first science-fiction writer in the language, money-lender to her father, self-proclaimed heretic, revolutionary agitator, sleepwalker, vegetarian, billiards player (with Byron) and amateur yachtsman (disastrously). His enthusiasms for ghost-hunting, hypnotism, mesmerism and alchemy make him one of the more eccentric, if not mad, poets of his time.

For all its popularity, the myth of the bad boy of Romantic verse thrives at the expense of a full appreciation of his writing: if you have his poems on your shelf, the text probably derives from that edited by Mary Shelley in 1839. Here in Volume II of Kelvin Everest and Geoffrey Matthews's edition are new versions of many of Shelley's greatest works: 'Ozymandias', The Cenci (no one's favourite play, admittedly), Prometheus Unbound (again, not a theatrical triumph, but a brilliant piece of writing), Laon and Cythna, 'Lines written among the Euganean Hills' and Julian and Maddalo.

Texts have been circulating for 180 years, but none so scrupulously edited as these. Every word, every comma, every accent has been checked against printed and manuscript sources, and is in some sense licensed by its author. For their part, Everest and Matthews provide headnotes explaining the origin and meaning of the poems, as well as annotations - all to the highest scholarly standards and without losing sight of the general reader. They also include poems, drafts and fragments hitherto available only to scholars or in corrupt versions. The result is the best edition so far published of this difficult writer.

These pages teem with insights and revelations gleaned from their extensive trawl through Shelley's notebooks. Never have the textual problems behind Prometheus Unbound been so clearly outlined, or the unused drafts for 'Misery' so methodically and helpfully presented. At £95 in hardback, only the most rabid of Shelleyans will rush to buy it, but even at that price it's a bargain: nearly four decades' work has gone into it, and it shows.