Professor Baker is concerned primarily with Shelley's development ns a philosophical and psychological poet, and it is precisely in this that the great achievement of the book lies. Originally published in 1966. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

'The Constitution of Shelley's Poetry' is a close philosophical reading of 'Prometheus Unbound' and other Shelley works from the perspective of the argument or drama of language played out in its pages. The book urges and practises close reading, but in the thought of Stanley Cavell, it finds and develops philosophical grounds for this ostensibly old-fashioned approach, and it implicitly proposes an understanding of language very different from those currently assumed in literary studies.

Shelley's detractors since Hazlitt have noticed a division in the 'self' of his poems. A central reasoning core fears the passions surrounding it and distrusts the language expressing it. A few of his admirers offer an alternative view of the poems as symbolical pointers to a non-linguistic reality transcending passion; most miss the point, justifying their admiration by referring to the poems' systems of thought. This reading of Shelley's major poems and critical prose finds the adverse case more convincing.

Writing to his publisher in 1813, Shelley expressed the hope that two of his major works should form one volume; nearly two centuries later, the second volume of the Johns Hopkins edition of The Complete Poetry fulfills that wish for the first time. This volume collects two important pieces: Queen Mab and The Esdaile Notebook. ... The poems are presented as Shelley intended, with textual variants included in footnotes. Following the poems are extensive discussions of the circumstances of their composition and the influences they reflect; their publication or circulation by other means; their reception at the time of publication and in the decades since; their re-publication, both authorized and unauthorized; and their place in Shelley's intellectual and aesthetic development. --Johns Hopkins University Press.

Madness and the Romantic Poet examines the longstanding and enduringly popular idea that poetry is connected to madness and mental illness. The idea goes back to classical antiquity, but it was given new life at the turn of the nineteenth century. The book offers a new and much more complete history of its development than has previously been attempted, alongside important associated ideas about individual genius, creativity, the emotions, rationality, and the mind in extreme states or disorder - ideas that have been pervasive in modern popular culture. More specifically, the book tells the story of the initial growth and wider dissemination of the idea of the 'Romantic mad poet' in the nineteenth century, how (and why) this idea became so popular, and how it interacted with the very different fortunes in reception and reputation of Romantic poets, their poetry, and attacks on or defences of Romanticism as a cultural trend generally - again leaving a popular legacy that endured into the twentieth century. Material covered includes nineteenth-century journalism, early literary criticism, biography, medical and psychiatric literature, and poetry. A wide range of scientific (and pseudoscientific) thinkers are discussed alongside major Romantic authors, including Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Hazlitt, Lamb, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Keats, Byron, and John Clare. Using this array of sources and figures, the book asks: was the Romantic mad genius just a sentimental stereotype or a romantic myth? Or does its long popularity tell us something serious about Romanticism and the role it has played, or has been given, in modern culture?