Shelley opens his letter to Thomas Love Peacock of 22 July 1816 by setting up the problem that propels the Scrope Davies Notebook into being:

The challenge of transmuting words into experience, the excessiveness of which experience seems to prevent any straightforward description, becomes the animating force of Shelley's letter and the poetry written in the summer of 1816. The Scrope Davies Notebook consists of two sonnets, ‘To Laughter’ and ‘Upon the wandering winds’, a version of ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, and Scene—Pont Pellisier in the vale of Servox, a version of Mont Blanc. Recovered in 1976 from a Barclay's vault, these poems create special editorial problems with regard to how to consider these drafts in relation to the other ‘finished’ poems, Mont Blanc (published in 1817 in Shelley and Mary Godwin's History of a Six Week's Tour) and Hymn to Intellectual Beauty (published on 19 January 1817 in the Examiner) that have been part of the Shelley canon since their publication. Mark Anderson notes the ‘substantial’ variations between the poems while admitting that ‘in the case of both the “Hymn” and “Mont Blanc,” these changes are manifestly not substantial enough to accord the versions the status of being different poems in our ordinary understanding of the term’.The recent nature of the discovery of ‘To Laughter’ and ‘Upon the wandering winds’ has meant that they have received slighter critical attention, but this chapter will seek to show that the shared compositional history of these poems facilitates them being read as a distinct group coloured by the letter to Thomas Love Peacock. Tilottama Rajan argues that Mont Blanc and the ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ ‘converge on the same problem: the mind's need to transcend life by positing some transcendent, form-giving fiction’.This insight suggests the seriousness of the poetic philosophy explored in the poetry, and this idea should be extended to Shelley's other poems in the notebook.