ABSTRACT
Published as one of the Miscellaneous Poems in 1820. S.’s draft, titled, in a mixture of pencil and ink, occupies two dozen pages in Nbk 10, almost all of them in the reverse direction of the nbk. Excepting the first two of these pages, it is written crossways on the page. As the nbk had largely been filled when S. began drafting A Vision, he was obliged to skip or overwrite existing draft material and to enter later parts of the poem before earlier ones in the reverse sequence of pages. The crossways writing no doubt served to help him locate the poem among a variety of other drafts when he came to transcribe the fair copy. The draft has the appearance of having been composed rapidly; the resulting loose script, together with the rubbing that has blurred some pencilled lines, and occasional blotting and show-through, render some passages very difficult to read. From the disposition of the draft over so many pages Mary Quinn concludes that it was the last major entry in a nbk in use between about spring 1819 and spring 1820. S.’s fair copy in Harvard Nbk 1 is dated ‘Pisa, April 1820’ in Mary's hand, and in 1839 Mary placed A Vision among the Poems Written in 1820. These converging indications establish April 1820 as the probable period of composition, and most editors have accepted the 1820 dating at least. Locock was a notable exception; the fragmentary state of the text and what he judged to be a marked immaturity of 366style he regarded as signs that the poem had been written considerably earlier and that ‘Shelley did not think it worth finishing’ (Locock 1911 ii 509). The combined weight of evidence from the draft, the fair copy and 1839 disposes of his supposition.
