This meditation on artistic creativity was written during the latter months of 1815, during a sojourn on the border of Windsor Forest. Critics have concurred in the opinion that the anonymous hero of the poem is Shelley himself, who feared that he too would become an "inheritor of unfulfilled renown". Today, the poem is considered to be the first major work of Shelley's maturity.

Appended to the collection were a number of shorter pieces:

1. "To Coleridge"
2. "Stanzas — April 1814"
3. "Mutability"
4. "The Pale, the Cold, and the Moony Smile"
5. "A Summer-Evening Church-Yard"
6. "To Wordsworth"
7. "Feelings of a Republican on the Fall of Bonaparte"
8. "Superstition"
9. "Sonnet from the Italian of Dante"
10. "Translated from the Greek of Moschus"
11. "The Daemon of the World"

The final poem is a reworking of the first two cantos of a much larger work, "Queen Mab", which was first published in 1813.