Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, 2 vols.

If ever we needed a forceful reminder of Byron's complexity, of his serious ambitions as a writer - even if he might continually want to undercut those claims, so that our own perplexity ends up mirroring his - then the evidence is here, presented with all the fullness and detail that we have come to expect - perhaps a bit too easily taking it for granted - from this edition.

There is a handful of mainly brief poems never before published; valuable appendices contain previously uncollected poems, new authentic poems, poems attributed to Byron (with indications of the editors' own views on each case), and a list of poems wrongly attributed to Byron (including forgeries). All this material is invaluable, and treated with the usual McGannian scrupulousness. For example, in Appendix B1 we have 'A Fragment' ('Slow sinks, more lovely ere his race be run, | Along Morea's hills the setting sun . . .'), which is normally read in its context as the opening lines of the 'Curse of Minerva': a detailed commentary gives details of the three proof texts of the poem, Byron's corrections to two of these, his comments about the lines (including his intention to publish them at the end of the seventh edition of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, I-II (1814)), the change of plan which led to these lines being placed at the opening of Canto III of The Corsair, the significance of the fragment as a Romantic 'form', with reference to Levinson's The Romantic Fragment Poem (1986), cross-references to the appropriate sections of the earlier volumes of the edition, along with an honest admission of error in the previous bibliographical …