The Destiny of Nations was originally composed by Samuel Taylor Coleridge as part of Robert Southey's Joan of Arc epic poem. The lines were later isolated from Southey's and expanded. The idea for the poem originates during mid-1795 while Coleridge gave lectures and was working with Southey on Joan of Arc, during which he set many of the lines he wrote aside for his own poem.
At the beginning of 1797, Coleridge attempted to complete the poem for a 1797 edition of his poems but he was unable to finish it. He soon replaced the poem with Ode to the Departing Year in the collection. The Destiny of Nations was expanded and those lines were published in the 26 December 1797 Morning Post as The Visions of the Maid of Orleans: A Fragment. Coleridge continued trying to finish the poem in 1798, but he abandoned it at the end of 1799 until taking it back up again in mid-1814 but it was not published in full until 1817.
The final version of the poem contains 272 lines, the last being incomplete, of which lines 1–120 correspond to lines 1–119 of Joan of Arc, Book II. These lines are followed by those published in the Morning Post, which make up lines 121–271a. The poem is concluded with a series of fragments from Joan of Arc Book II that make up the rest of what he wrote for the epic. Warning: template has been deprecated.
