Just over a year after their time together at the Lake of Geneva, Shelley wrote to Byron that he ‘had, completed a poem … in the style, and for the same object as “Queen Mab”, but interwoven with a story of human passion’ (Letters, i. 557). In this first apology for Laon and Cythna (Rogers, 99–273), he overlooks the achievment of ‘Hymn’ and ‘Mont Blanc’ to ask for his new ‘vision of the nineteenth century ’ to be understood as a revision of his earlier ‘Philosophical Poem’, as he described Queen Mab to Byron. The new work is meant to improve on the language and connectedness of Queen Mab. Byron, unimpressed, declared that the poem's obscurity made it unnecessary for it to have been withdrawn, bowdlerized, and reissued as The Revolt of Islam (H&M 32–158). Shelley's ‘Preface’, though, describes the poem as ‘an experiment on the temper of the public mind’, recalling Wordsworth's claim almost twenty years earlier in his ‘Advertisement ’ to Lyrical Ballads. Had he known, Shelley could also have been reviving the Coleridgean project of Wordsworth's unpublished Prelude to restore confidence in ‘visionary minds’. Once more he resisted the fall into the religiosity and imperialism of the Excursion.

The ‘Preface’ describes the poetry of Laon and Cythna in language used by the later A Defence of Poetry. Here is little of the dramatic tension between poetic theory and performance found in Alastor. Shelley is ambitious of producing ‘Poetry in its most comprehensive sense’ (Rogers, 103). Shelley continues to widen the definition of poetry throughout his career. The state of mind of which, he told Godwin, his poem was a ‘picture’, attempted to use poetry to awaken a reciprocal sense of unregulated possibility in his readers (Letters, i. 577). Shelley hopes to receive confirmation of his own generously imagined state of mind from the ‘enlightened and refined’ (Rogers, 99). His élitism is not straightforward. His audience's enlightenment and refinement are functions of their poetic sympathy, and so designate membership of that disposable vanguard that extends through revolutionary thought from Marx to Lenin and Gramsci. In stating his affiliation to a culturally privileged class, Shelley redescribed that culture as a philanthropic capacity to think one's way beyond immediate interests – even, frightening paradox, at the cost of these cultural advantages that made such benevolence possible.