SHELLEY, Percy Bysshe.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Adonais. First British edition, second overall, of Shelley's finest poem. "It was this second edition of Adonais... that was chiefly responsible for the first general enthusiasm over Shelley" (Granniss, p. 73).Keats died in Rome of consumption in February 1821, and by June Shelley had completed Adonais in Pisa. The publication of the British edition was arranged by and "indicative of the special enthusiasm for both Keats and Shelley of young men such as Richard Monckton Milnes, Arthur Hallam, and Alfred Tennyson" (MacGillivray, p. 104). Hallam championed the works of Keats and Shelley in Britain and professed them the "poets of sensation" (p. 4). Tennyson wrote the great eulogy, In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850), after Hallam's death in Vienna in 1833.The British edition is an exact reprint of the first edition of Adonais, notwithstanding a few typographical corrections. The preface contains the famous condemnation of the critics whose adverse comments on Endymion were thought by Shelley to have caused the breakdown of Keats's health. William Michael Rossetti notes that "the Cambridge edition... is now still scarcer than the Pisan one" (p. 39).

• Printing: later

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