Thus far, I have primarily looked to ways in which Romantic-era writers utilized representations of mother–child bonds as a means to variously critique or endorse seemingly natural constructions of interpersonal and intercultural relations. In this final chapter, I want to examine a somewhat different deployment of maternal imagery in the essays and poetry of Percy Shelley, who frequently described the work of the creative artist through reference to analogies of pregnancy and breastfeeding. To be sure, such comparisons were not unique, either to the Romantic period or to writers who were strongly influenced by Romantic discourses and themes, as the above quotations illustrate. Nor were appeals to the affinities between intellectual and maternal labor the sole province of poets and philosophers.