ABSTRACT
‘“The Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” was conceived during his voyage round the lake [Léman] with Lord Byron’ (Mary S.’s ‘Note on the Poems of 1816’, 1839 iii 35). As Gavin de Beer has now established (SC iv 690–701), that expedition took place 22–30 June 1816, so the MS date on Harvard (see below), ‘Switzerland June-1816’, may only be that of the original conception. When S. left Geneva on 29 August a notebook containing this poem in Mary S.’s hand and ‘Mont Blanc’ in S.’s hand remained with Byron, who entrusted its return to his friend Scrope Davies; the latter, however, never delivered it, and the existence of the notebook (SDMS) was revealed only in December 1976 after its discovery in a deposit-box at the Pall Mall branch of Barclay’s Bank in London. The poem must therefore have been written between 22 June and 29 August, very possibly on 27–9 June when the lake party was weatherbound at Ouchy, near Lausanne, and Byron used the time to compose The Prisoner of 523 Chilton (Byron L&J v 82). The absence of a first draft could imply indoor composition, while Mary S. seems uncertain when the actual writing took place. Even so, the poem may not have been completed before August (the last stanza anticipates the end of summer), and could in theory postdate the completion of ‘Mont Blanc’. Under the pseudonym ‘The Elfin Knight’ S. submitted the poem to The Examiner, where Hunt acknowledged its receipt on 6 October, but confessed in the issue of 1 December that the MS had been mislaid. S. may already have replaced the loss when he wrote to Hunt on 8 December: ‘Next, will I own the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty? I do not care. As you like. And yet the poem was composed under the influence of feelings which agitated me even to tears, so that I think it deserves a better fate than the being linked with so stigmatised & unpopular a name (so far as it is known) as mine’ (L i 517). Hunt finally published it on 19 January over S.’s own name. The probable sequence is, then, that S.’s fair copy which Mary S. used for her transcription in SDMS was the text sent to Hunt and lost, and as SDMS itself also seemed to be lost the text Hunt eventually printed derives from a return, in England, to the hasty but clean copy of the poem (missing stanza 4) in S.’s draft notebook, Bod. MS Shelley adds.e.16, ff. 57–61 (Nbk 1). The relationship of these versions is discussed in RES xxix (1978) 36–49 by Chernaik and Burnett, who reach the same conclusions. The Examiner text is certainly closer than SDMS to the text in Nbk 1. Thus there are two distinct texts of the Hymn, both reproduced below: ‘A’, the first-completed version from SDMS, and ‘B’, the reworked version printed in The Examiner. S. was in Italy when the poem was reprinted in 1819, and either his publisher Oilier or Peacock was responsible for the changed pointing and other revisions, which have no authority. Mary S.’s pointing in SDMS has been respected in Text A except where its absence causes obscurity: commas are added in lines 19, 20, 26, 43, 59, 70, 83, and full stops in lines 36, 48; a colon is added in line 53. Notes that are relevant to both texts will be found under Text B.
