Hymn to Intellectual Beauty

"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.

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.

The "names of Demon, Ghost, and Heaven" are the record of men's vain attempts to get answers to such questions.

According to the narrator, we have only temporary access to these values and can only attain them through Intellectual Beauty:[3] In stanza five, he reveals: The words he speaks, possibly referring to Christian doctrines, brought him no response.

[7] The "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" was conceived and written during a boating excursion with Byron on Lake Geneva, Switzerland, in June 1816.

He was profoundly moved by it, and the poem, he wrote to Leigh Hunt, was "composed under the influence of feelings which agitated me even to tears."

The worship of beauty is Shelley's new religion, and it is significant that he calls his poem a hymn, a term used almost exclusively for religious verse.

Joseph Barrell, in Shelley and the Thought of His Time: A Study in the History of Ideas, has shown that the "Hymn" is not Platonic.

The central idea of "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" is that there is a spiritual power that stands apart from both the physical world and the heart of man.

But since the Spirit of Beauty visits the world and man's heart with such irregularity, Shelley pleads with his deity rather than praises it.

In Stanza V, Shelley confesses that in his youth, while he was searching for spiritual reality, chiefly by reading Gothic romances, the shadow of Intellectual Beauty suddenly fell on him.