Pyramid of Cestius an essential sight for many who undertook the Grand Tour in the 18th and 19th centuries. It was much admired by architects, becoming the primary model for pyramids built in the West during this period. Percy Bysshe Shelley described it as "one keen pyramid with wedge sublime" in "Adonaïs", his 1821 elegy for John Keats. In turn the English novelist and poet Thomas Hardy saw the pyramid during a visit to the nearby Protestant Cemetery in 1887 and was inspired to write a poem, "Rome: At the Pyramid of Cestius near the Graves of Shelley and Keats", in which he
Monody on the Death of Chatterton sing of Chatterton, and narrator poet responds by describing Chatterton's death: After describing Chatterton's fate and lamenting over his fate, the narrator begins to identify himself with Chatterton. Soon after, the poem returns to Chatterton's death, and the narrator implores Chatterton to help him attain a divine status: Of the final two lines Coleridge said, in a note to the 1823 copy of the first version, that they contain "a sentiment which in his cooler moments he would have abhor'd the thought of". Coleridge removed the Pindaric ode and replaced it with a Romantic elegy structured by heroic couplets. Only