Queen Mab and the Esdaile Notebook represent the range and ambition of Shelley's early poetry. Taken together, as Shelley had hoped, they reveal the evolution of the young poet, as Donald H. R eiman and Neil Fraistat suggest with their comparison of Shelley's poetry with Wordsworth's The Prelude and The Excursion. Despite this enthusiastic appraisal, criticism on Queen Mab balances censure of his epic as ‘an unsuccessful emulsion of anti-Christian, pantheistic, deistic, materialistic, and necessitarian principles’ against measured praise for Shelley's ambition and political and philosophical preoccupations,and the Esdaile Notebook has received minimal critical interest. However, the fascination with aesthetic power and pleasure embedded in these poems has been under-explored, despite contemporary critics’ praise for Shelley's poetic rather than polemical faculty.This chapter will stress Shelley's burgeoning interest in poetic artistry. Such artistry becomes more than a mechanism to awaken the reader politically as the poetry seeks to perceive and articulate beauty in a manner that Shelley would later claim to be the central role of the poet in A Defence of Poetry: ‘to be a poet is to apprehend the true and the beautiful’ (pp. 676–77). This chapter will explore Shelley's artistry in his poetry and letters to reveal his early work as increasingly alert to the possibilities and the limits of language.

Shelley's letters to Elizabeth Hitchener reveal an unparalleled and extraordinary epistolary intensity. Their friendship, conducted entirely by letters, until he finally persuaded her to move in with him and his family in a disastrous experiment, showed Shelley forging a profound connection with his addressee. His philosophical, religious, and personal beliefs were condensed into the letters exchanged by the pair. Writing to her on 16 October 1811—while he was composing the Esdaile Notebook and his epic, Queen Mab—seeking and finding a connection that he felt bore witness to their twinned souls, Shelley tips into near worship of the possibilities inherent in their connection: