Composition and Publication
"Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" was written during the summer of 1816 while Percy and Mary Shelley stayed with Lord Byron near Lake Geneva, Switzerland. Percy Shelley sent a finished copy of the poem to his friend Leigh Hunt who immediately lost it. Shelley was therefore forced to create another finished draft of the poem and resend the poem. It was eventually published in Hunt's Examiner on 19 January 1817. The poem also appeared in the 1819 collection Rosalind and Helen, A Modern Eclogue, With Other Poems printed by C. H. Reynell for Charles and James Ollier in London and in Miscellaneous and Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley by William Benbow in 1826 in London. After the initial publication, Percy Shelley corrected lines 27 and 58 but made no other changes. A second finished version was discovered in December 1976 in the Scrope Davies Notebook; it was written in Mary Shelley's hand and contained many differences from the first published edition.
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