Details

Title

The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley

Author

Shelley, Percy Bysshe

Place of Publication

New York

Publisher

Crowell

Date of Publication

1878 Show more1878-01-01T00:00:00.000Z
1878-01-01T00:00:00.000Z Show less

Collection

Scans provided by and used with permission of Archival & Special Collections, University of Guelph Library. From the L.M. Montgomery Collection.

Note

It is perhaps surprising that Montgomery’s volume of the poems of Percy Shelley, inscribed in 1912, contains very few annotations or markings from Montgomery and just a single tucked in illustration. It would be easy to assume, given Montgomery’s love of other poets from the Romantic movement like Wordsworth, that she would have engaged with Shelley more fully. Researcher and editor Rea Wilmshurst noted that Montgomery may have referenced Shelley’s work just once, only obliquely, in her fiction. Wilmshurst took note of where Montgomery used the phrase “wild and fitful” to describe the quality of light in a church in chapter 21 of ‘The Golden Road’. Shelley’s “Melody to a Scene of Former Time” includes the lines “'Tis night — what faint and distant scream / Comes on the wild and fitful blast?” Whether Montgomery included this echo is impossible to know, but the phrase is certainly the kind descriptive note to which she would be drawn. The illustration she tucked into this volume, however, is titled ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci,’ a poem by John Keats not Shelley. Perhaps the illustration was meant to end up in her volume of Keats, but the similar spines of the two books, both published by Crowell in New York, made her mistake one for the other. Montgomery liked beautiful, well-bound books, so perhaps her matching Crowell volumes, even with their different colored covers, were shelved together.

Genre

poetry