ABSTRACT
Dates of composition and publication. The poem is dated ‘September, 1820’ in 1824 119 and in a fair-copy MS in Mary's hand in Box 2 f. 132r that is reproduced with a transcription in BSM xxii, Pt, II, 316–17. But composition in fact took place 17–25 August 1820 according to Mary's journal. In her entry summarising that week, she juxtaposes the writing of Ode to Naples and OT (no. 344): ‘on 24th Mrs Mason comes for the day. Shelley writes an ode to Naples … Begins—Swellfoot the Tyrant—suggested by the pigs at the fair of St. Guiliano [sic]—’ (Mary Jnl i 329–30). This is amplified in her Note on OT in 1840 191:
In the brief journal I kept in those days, I find recorded, in August 1820, Shelley “begins Swellfoot the Tyrant, suggested by the pigs at the fair of San Giuliano.” … We were then at the Baths of San Giuliano; a friend came to visit us on the day when a fair was held in the square, beneath our windows: Shelley read to us his Ode to Liberty; and was riotously accompanied by the grunting of a quantity of pigs brought for sale to the fair.
