To —

This lyric is drafted on pp. 342 rev. and 343 rev. of Nbk 15, where it is entitled ‘A Hate-Song’. Mary made a fair copy in Harvard Nbk 1 under the title To — The rough state of the draft as well as a few substantive differences between it and the fair copy would indicate either that she transcribed from an intermediate fair copy made by S. or that he revised his draft while guiding her transcription from Nbk 15. In the draft, for example, the winter of l. 3 is cancelled and ‘frozen’ substituted for it, and the final word of draft l. 13 is ‘move’ not prove. The fair copy was later torn from Harvard Nbk 1 together with the fair copy of the irregular sonnet To — [Lines to a Reviewer] (no. 305) and that of Song: To the Men of England (no. 291), the latter occupying each of the other sides of the consecutive leaves on which the two shorter poems were copied. The two leaves in question are now in Box 1 where they are numbered ff. 75^r-76^v. Both Lines to a Reviewer and the present poem were published by Leigh Hunt in 1823, so it is likely that the fair copies were torn from Harvard Nbk 1 in 1822 or 1823 to serve as press copy for Hunt. Lines to a Critic is the title under which this lyric appeared in the third number (April 1823) of The Liberal. Verse and Prose from the South (187–8), which was subsequently bound as the first number of The Liberal vol. ii. It is accompanied by the following editorial note, evidently by Hunt:

We have given the stupid malignity of the Investigator a better answer than it is worth already. The writers must lay it to the account of our infirmity, and to a lurking something of orthodoxy in us. But in these “Lines to a Critic”, the Reverend Calumniator, or Calumniators, will see what sort of an answer Mr. Shelley would have given them: for the beautiful effusion is his. Let the reader, when he has finished them, say which is the better Christian,—the “religious” reviver of bitter and repeated calumnies upon one who differs with him in opinion, or the “profane” philanthropist who can answer in such a spirit? (187)