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Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire

{{Short description|Poetry written by Percy Bysshe Shelley and his sister Elizabeth}}

{{italic title}}

{{EngvarB|date=September 2013}}

{{Use dmy dates|date=May 2024}}

File:Original Poetry Shelley 1810.jpg File:Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire 1898 title page.jpgOriginal Poetry by Victor and Cazire was a poetry collection written by Percy Bysshe Shelley and his sister Elizabeth which was printed by Charles and William Phillips in Worthing and published by John Joseph Stockdale in September 1810. The work was Shelley's first published volume of poetry. Shelley wrote the poems in collaboration with his sister Elizabeth.{{harvnb|Dexter|2010}} The poems were written before Shelley entered the University of Oxford.

The volume consisted of sixteen poems and a fragment of a poem. Shelley wrote eleven of the poems while Elizabeth wrote five. Shelley contributed seven lyrical poems, four Gothic poems, and the political poem "The Irishman's Song". Elizabeth wrote three lyrical poems and two verse epistles. The collection included the early poems "Revenge", "Ghasta, Or, The Avenging Demon!!!", "Song: Sorrow", and "Song: Despair". The epigraph was from the "Lay of the Last Minstrel" by Sir Walter Scott: "Call it not vain:— they do not err, Who say, that, when the poet dies, Mute Nature mourns her worshipper."

Controversy surrounded the work, however, because one of the poems included, "Saint Edmond's Eve", originally appeared in the anonymously published Tales of Terror (1801), attributed to Matthew Gregory Lewis.{{harvnb|Dowden|1884}} Shelley told Stockdale that his sister Elizabeth had included the Lewis poem. Shelley apologised and informed Stockdale to suppress the volume.{{harvnb|Stockdale|1826}} Fourteen hundred and eighty copies had been printed and one hundred copies had been circulated.{{harvnb|Garnett|1860}} Fearing a plagiarism lawsuit, Stockdale withdrew the work from publication. Copies of the work became extremely rare and it lapsed into obscurity. Four original copies are known to exist.[https://www.nypl.org/blog/2014/04/18/black-tulip-pforzheimer-collection Denlinger, Elizabeth. "A Black Tulip Comes to the Pforzheimer Collection". Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, April 18, 2014.][https://www.nypl.org/blog/beta/2014/04/23/black-tulip-comes-pforzheimer-collection-2 Denlinger, Elizabeth. "A Black Tulip Comes to the Pforzheimer Collection". Part 2. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, April 18, 2014.][https://k-saa.org/nypl-acquires-rare-original-poetry-by-victor-and-cazire-p-b-shelleys-first-book-of-verse/ "NYPL acquires rare Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire, P.B. Shelley’s first book of verse." Keats-Shelley of Association America.]

In 1859, Richard Garnett was able to substantiate that the volume had been published but was unable to locate an extant copy. The collection was reprinted and revived in 1898 by John Lane in an edition edited by Richard Garnett after a copy of the volume had been found.

Contents

  1. Letter ("Here I sit with my paper, my pen and my ink")
  2. Letter: To Miss—From Miss –
  3. Song ("Cold, cold is the blast when December is howling")
  4. Song ("Come ---! Sweet is the hour")
  5. Song: Despair
  6. Song: Sorrow
  7. Song: Hope
  8. Song: Translated From the Italian
  9. Song: Translated From the German
  10. The Irishman's Song
  11. Song ("Fierce roars the midnight storm")
  12. Song: To – ("Ah! sweet is the moonbeam that sleeps on yon fountain")
  13. Song: To – ("Stern, stern is the voice of fate's fearful command")
  14. Saint Edmond's Eve
  15. Revenge
  16. Ghasta Or, The Avenging Demon!!!
  17. Fragment, Or The Triumph of Conscience

Critical reception

The volume was advertised in the Morning Chronicle of 18 September, the Morning Post of 19 September, and The Times of 12 October 1810. Reviews appeared in Literary Panorama, The Anti-Jacobin Review, The British Critic, and The Poetical Register. The reviews, which primarily focused on Elizabeth's poems, were negative and highly critical. Literary Panorama dismissed the poems as examples of "nonsensical rhyme". The British Critic review described the volume as "filled up by songs of sentimental nonsense, and very absurd tales of horror." The Poetical Register called the poems "downright scribble" and a "waste of paper", dismissing "all this sort of trash".{{harvnb|Shelley|2000|p=160}}

In 2015, David Duff wrote that Original Poetry represents "a vital stage in Shelley's literary development, reflecting a fascinating but under-explored phase in the broader culture of Romanticism."Duff, David. "Harps, Heroes and Yelling Vampires: The 1810 Poetry Collections", in The Neglected Shelley, edited by Alan A. Weinberg and Timothy Webb, Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2015, p. 75. The influence and impact of the work endured: "But the literary experiments of 1810 --- an adventure in writing and book-making involving every kind of transgression, textual, political, and legal --- had a formative effect on his work, the traces of which he could never fully erase."Duff 2015, p. 76

Influence

Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire influenced Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). In her biography of Mary Shelley, Anne Kostelanetz Mellor noted the influence of the work on the latter novel:

"As William Veeder has most recently reminded us, several dimensions of Victor Frankenstein are modelled directly on Percy Shelley. (6) Victor was Percy Shelley's pen-name for his first publication, Original Poetry; by Victor and Cazire (1810). Victor Frankenstein's family resembles Percy Shelley's: in both, the father is married to a woman young enough to be his daughter; in both the oldest son has a favorite sister (adopted sister, or cousin, in Frankenstein's case) named Elizabeth. Frankenstein's education is based on Percy Shelley's: both were avid students of Albertus Magnus, Paracelsus, Pliny, and Buffon; both were fascinated by alchemy and chemistry; both were excellent linguists, acquiring fluency in Latin, Greek, German, French, English, and Italian. (7)"{{harvnb|Mellor|1988|pp=72–73}}

The theme of unremitting vengeance is also common to both works. "Revenge" and "Ghasta, Or, The Avenging Demon!!!" rely on the theme of revenge. The Being similarly seeks revenge against Victor Frankenstein. John V. Murphy noted in The Dark Angel: Gothic Elements in Shelley's Works that the revenge motif was a major theme of Shelley's writings: "The idea of an avenging demon is central in Shelley's poetry and, in diverse form, will appear in almost all of the major works."{{harvnb|Murphy|1975|p=42}} Revenge is the major theme of Zastrozzi (1810), Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson (1810), and The Cenci (1819).

The language of the two works is also similar. In the poem "Revenge", line 20, the narrator exclaims: "Alone will I glut its all conquering maw." In Frankenstein, the Being expresses a similar sentiment: "I will glut the maw of death."

See also

Notes

{{reflist}}

References

  • {{Cite news

| last = Dexter

| first = Gary

| title = Title Deed: How the Book Got its Name

| work = The Daily Telegraph|location=London

| access-date = 25 September 2010

| date = 16 May 2010

| url = https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/7725155/Title-Deed-How-the-Book-Got-its-Name.html

}}

  • {{Cite journal

| issue = 46

| pages = 383–396

| last = Dowden

| first = Edward

| title = Some Early Writings of Shelley

| journal = The Contemporary Review

| year = 1884

| url = https://books.google.com/books?id=ppLQAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA383

| author-link = Edward Dowden

| oclc = 35170347

}}

  • Dowden, Edward (1886). The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, and Co.
  • {{Cite journal

| volume = 2

| pages = 100–110

| last = Garnett

| first = Richard

| title = Shelley in Pall Mall

| journal = Macmillan's Magazine

| date = 2 June 1860

| url = https://books.google.com/books?id=mK8ZAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA100

}}

  • {{Cite book

| publisher = J. Lection

| page = 288

| last = MacCarthy

| first = D. F.

| title = The Athenaeum, Part 1

| chapter = Shelly's "Victor and Cazire"

| date = 28 February 1877

| chapter-url = https://books.google.com/books?id=619IAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA288

}}

  • {{Cite book

| publisher = Methuen

| isbn = 978-0-415-02591-1

| last = Mellor

| first = Anne Kostelanetz

| title = Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters

| year = 1988

| url = https://archive.org/details/maryshelleyherli0000mell

| url-access = registration

| page = [https://archive.org/details/maryshelleyherli0000mell/page/72 72]

| oclc = 16950424

}}

  • {{Cite book

| publisher = Bucknell University Press

| isbn = 0-8387-1407-2

| last = Murphy

| first = John V.

| title = The Dark Angel: Gothic Elements in Shelley's Works

| location = Lewisburg PA

| year = 1975

| oclc = 914548

| url = https://archive.org/details/darkangelgothice0000murp

| url-access = registration

}}

  • {{Cite journal

| issn = 1528-8129

| last = Reiman

| first = Donald H.

|editor=Neil Fraistat

| title = Shelley Comes of Age: His Early Poems As an Editorial Experience

| journal = Early Shelley: Vulgarisms, Politics, and Fractals

| access-date = 25 September 2010

| date = August 1997

| url = http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/earlyshelley/reiman/reiman.html

}}

  • {{Cite encyclopedia

| last = Sandy

| first = Mark

| title = Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire

| encyclopedia = The Literary Encyclopedia

| access-date = 25 September 2010

| date = 20 September 2002

| url = http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=3010

}}

  • {{Cite book

| publisher = The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc.

| isbn = 0-672-51457-5

| first = Mary

| last = Shelley

| editor-last = Rieger

| editor-first = James

| title = Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus (1818 Text)

| location = Indianapolis and New York

| year = 1974

}}

  • {{Cite book

| publisher = The Riverside Press

| last = Shelley

| first = Percy Bysshe

| editor-last = Woodberry

| editor-first = George Edward

| editor-link = George Edward Woodberry

| title = The complete poetical works of Percy Bysshe Shelley

| year = 1892

| url = https://books.google.com/books?id=1IIVAAAAYAAJ

}}. Also see:

  • {{Cite book

| publisher = Houghton Mifflin

| isbn = 1-58734-058-5

| last = Shelley

| first = Percy Bysshe

| editor-last = Woodberry

| editor-first = George Edward

| editor-link = George Edward Woodberry

| title = The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley

| location = Boston

| series = The Cambridge Edition of the Poets

| year = 1901

| url = http://www.bartleby.com/139/

| access-date = 4 October 2010

| oclc = 48506449

}}. The text of this edition is that of the Centenary edition of Shelley's Poetical works, 1892, but differs from it by the omission of variant readings and emendations except in cases where the text is acknowledged to be corrupt or of doubtful authority.

  • {{Cite book

| publisher = Johns Hopkins University Press

| isbn = 0-8018-6119-5

| volume = 2

| last = Shelley

| first = Percy

| others = Donald H. Reiman, Neil Fraistat (eds.)

| title = The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley

| location = Baltimore MD

| year = 2000

| url = https://books.google.com/books?id=x8y1HdrGT40C

| oclc = 41096094

}}

  • {{citation|last = Stockdale | first = John Joseph | title = Stockdale's Budget | date = 13 December 1826}}
  • Veeder, William. "The Negative Oedipus: Father, Frankenstein, and the Shelleys." Critical Inquiry, 12.2 (1986): 365–90.
  • {{Cite web

| last = Woudhuysen

| first = H. R.

| title = Shelley's Fantastic Prank

| work = Times Literary Supplement

| access-date = 4 October 2010

| date = 12 July 2006

| url = http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/tls_selections/literature_and_criticism/article2305759.ece

| archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20110615131845/http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/tls_selections/literature_and_criticism/article2305759.ece

| url-status = dead

| archive-date = 15 June 2011

}}

Further reading

  • {{Cite web

| last = Grande

| first = James

| title = The Original Frankenstein, By Mary Shelley with Percy Shelley ed Charles E Robinson. To what extent did Percy Bysshe Shelley work on 'Frankenstein'? A new analysis reveals all.

| work = The Independent

| access-date = 19 October 2010

| date = 16 November 2008

| url = https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-original-frankenstein-by-mary-shelley-with-percy-shelley-ed-charles-e-robinson-1017483.html

}}

  • Shelley, Mary, with Percy Shelley. The Original Frankenstein. Edited with an Introduction by Charles E. Robinson. NY: Random House Vintage Classics, 2008. {{ISBN|978-0-307-47442-1}}

External links

  • [http://www.infoplease.com/t/lit/shelley/3/3/10.html#axzz0zNneUN9u Online edition.]
  • [https://books.google.com/books?id=RJ8pAQAAIAAJ&q=original+poetry+victor+cazire Online versions of the 1810 and 1898 editions on Google Books.]

{{Percy Bysshe Shelley}}

{{Authority control}}

Category:1810 poems

Category:Poetry by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Category:1810 books

Category:Revenge

Category:Gothic fiction

Category:Romantic poems

Category:British poetry collections