Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson
Under the title Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Thomas Jefferson Hogg published a collection of poems in 1810 , which they put on the estate of the mentally confused assassin Margaret Nicholson .
The work expresses the anti-monarchical and anti-war views that Shelley further developed in Queen Mab in 1812 and summarized in Ozymandias . Kings are "just dust", it says here, and the "eventful last day" will "make everyone equal":
" Kings are but dust --- the last eventful day / Will level all and make them lose their sway; / Will dash the scepter from the Monarch's hand, / And from the warrior's grasp wrest the ensanguin'd brand. "
According to Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat, 250 copies of the collection were printed and sold. A new edition was not published until 1877, as a private print.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Nicholson was still alive then until 1828 - a fact which the two rebellious Oxford students were apparently unknown.
- ^ Barbara Judson: The Politics of Medusa: Shelley's Physiognomy of Revolution. ELH , Johns Hopkins University, Volume 68, Number 1, Spring, 2001, pp. 135-154.
- ↑ in The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley
Web links
- Infoplease article on the topic: Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson
- Description in Percy Bysshe Shelley: The complete poetical works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Houghton, Mifflin company, 1901, p. 554 ( limited preview in Google book search).
- Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson Robert Penn Warren
- Online version of the 1810 print
- Version of the 1877 print: Percy Bysshe Shelley: Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson . J. Munday, 1810 ( limited preview in Google Book search).