# Is "Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats" by Percy Bysshe Shelley a First Edition?

> **Quick answer.** A first edition of Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats by Percy Bysshe Shelley (With the Types of Didot, 1821) is identified by: First edition, a quarto pamphlet of 25 pages comprising the 55-stanza, 495-line elegy in Spenserian stanzas, prefaced by Shelley's attack on the Quarterly Review's hostile treatment of Keats's Endymion, which Shelley believed had hastened Keats's death.

**Checklist — a true first has these:**
- First edition, a quarto pamphlet of 25 pages comprising the 55-stanza, 495-line elegy in Spenserian stanzas, prefaced by Shelley's attack on the Quarterly Review's hostile treatment of Keats's Endymion, which Shelley believed had hastened Keats's death
- Shelley personally supervised the Pisa printing, carried out under the direction of the printer Niccolò Capurro, in an edition of about 300 copies
- Issued in plain wrappers or boards as a slim pamphlet rather than in a decorative trade binding, with no English publisher named on the title page
- Publisher imprint reads With the Types of Didot
- Not a book-club edition (see below)

| | |
|---|---|
| Author | Percy Bysshe Shelley |
| Publisher | With the Types of Didot |
| Year | 1821 |
| True first | — |
| Format | Poetry |
| Key point | First edition, a quarto pamphlet of 25 pages comprising the 55-stanza, 495-line elegy in Spenserian stanzas, prefaced by Shelley's attack… |
| Book-club edition exists? | — |

## Points of issue
First edition, a quarto pamphlet of 25 pages comprising the 55-stanza, 495-line elegy in Spenserian stanzas, prefaced by Shelley's attack on the Quarterly Review's hostile treatment of Keats's Endymion, which Shelley believed had hastened Keats's death. Shelley personally supervised the Pisa printing, carried out under the direction of the printer Niccolò Capurro, in an edition of about 300 copies. Issued in plain wrappers or boards as a slim pamphlet rather than in a decorative trade binding, with no English publisher named on the title page.

## Telling it from reprints & book-club editions
Mary Shelley's posthumous collected editions of Shelley's Poetical Works, beginning in 1824, print a revised text of Adonais with wording changes from the 1821 Pisa text; a copy within any collected edition of Shelley's works is not the stand-alone 1821 Pisa first edition.

## Source
New Mexico Literacy Project — Is *Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats* by Percy Bysshe Shelley a first edition? https://newmexicoliteracyproject.org/first-edition/adonais-an-elegy-on-the-death-of-john-keats
CC BY 4.0. Part of the Canonical First-Edition Points of Issue dataset (https://newmexicoliteracyproject.org/api/first-edition-titles.json). Last reviewed 2026-07-04.