Lyons, March<\/em>\u00a022 \u00a01818.\u2013\u2013<\/p>\n My dear friend,<\/p>\n Why did you not wake me the night before we left England, you & Marianne \u00a0I take this as rather an unkind piece of kindness in you, but which in consideration of the 600 miles between us I forgive.\u00a0\u2013\u2013<\/p>\n We have journeyed towards the spring that has been hastening to meet us from the South\u2013\u2013 & though our weather was at first abominable, we have now warm sunny days & soft winds & a sky of deep azure, the most serene I ever saw. The heat in this city to day, is like that of London in the middle of summer\u2013 \u00a0My spirits & health sympathise in the change. Indeed before I left London my spirits were as feeble as my health \u2013 and I had demands on them which I found\u00a0 difficult to supply.<\/p>\n I have read Foliage<\/em>\u2013\u2013 With most of the poems I was already familiar. What a delightful poem the Nymphs is, & especially the second part. It is truly\u00a0poetical<\/em> in the intense & emphatic sense of the word. If 600 miles were not between us, I should say what pity that\u00a0glib<\/em>\u00a0is not omitted & that the poem is not as faultless as it is beautiful! But for fear I should\u00a0spoil<\/em>\u00a0your next poem I will not let slip a word upon the subject\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u00a0 Give my love to Marianne & her sister & tell Marianne she defrauded me of a kiss by not waking me when she went away, & that as I have no better mode of conveying it I must take the best, & ask you to pay the debt. When shall I see you all again ? O, that it might b<e> in Italy! I confess that the thought of how long we may be divided make<s> me very melancholy:\u2013 Adieu \u2013my d<ear> friends\u2013\u2013 \u00a0write soon\u2013\u00a0 ever most affectionately Yours [Shelley & his Circle<\/em> VI: 523-4.]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n Prof. Weinberg contextualises Shelley in Italy for us:<\/p>\n In the first 8 months of their residence in Italy (April to December 1818) the Shelleys crossed the length and breadth of Italy (excluding Sicily) and resided in or stopped by at a great number of places including (more importantly, and in something like chronological sequence), Turin, Milan, Como, Pisa, Livorno, Bagni di Lucca, Florence, Padua, Este, Venice, Ferrara, Bologna, Spoleto, Terni, Rome, Naples and its environs including Vesuvius. Visits were usually accompanied by sightseeing in regard to architecture and landscape or visits to palaces, prisons or picture galleries. \u00a0There were periods of calm and some of frenetic travelling by carriage in circumstances which would be a trial for the modern tourist. The Shelleys had few acquaintances and had two small children to look after, William and Clara, as well as assist with Claire and Byron\u2019s daughter, Allegra, and in September, endured the severe illness and loss of their daughter Clara. It is not generally recognized that in these early months, Shelley wrote only one major poem, and it is one of his neglected Italianate pieces in iambic tetrameter and trimeter,\u00a0Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills.\u00a0<\/em>It was largely inspired by Petrarch.\u00a0<\/em>Several\u00a0other\u00a0compositions, like\u00a0Prometheus Unbound<\/em>\u00a0and ‘Julian and Maddalo’, were begun and only completed in 1819, or were eventually aborted, like ‘Prince Athanase’, a redaction of which appeared in press copy in 1819 as \u2018Athanase: A Fragment’ (but was not published). \u00a0One prose essay, \u00a0‘Discourse on the Manners of the Ancient Greeks’ was finished in draft, the translation from the\u00a0Symposium<\/em>\u00a0nearly completed, and a few other prose works, such as a Preface to\u00a0The Banquet<\/em>\u00a0(Symposium), ‘The Coliseum’ (begun December 1818) and ‘A Future State’, were left unfinished in manuscript.<\/p>\n Shelley\u2019s residence in Italy is a turning point in his career: it follows a period of intense creativity which saw the composition of\u00a0Alastor<\/em>.\u00a0Mont Blanc<\/em>,\u00a0Hymn to Intellectual Beauty<\/em>, Laon and Cythna<\/em>\u00a0(re-named\u00a0The Revolt of Islam<\/em>),\u00a0Rosalind and Helen<\/em>, as well as a\u00a0History of a Six Weeks\u2019\u00a0Tour,<\/em>\u00a0prefaces, reviews, political pamphlets, essays (like the sketch ‘On Christianity\u2019 (more specifically Christ\u2019s teachings), and brief, mostly unfinished political or philosophical sketches.\u00a0Laon and Cythna<\/em>\u00a0was meant to be the crowning piece in which Shelley encompassed much of what he understood to be his task as poet and seer, and was written in the belief that he was suffering from consumption and thus had not long to live. He put his heart and soul into this composition but it didn\u2019t win much favour. The early residence in Italy was clearly a period of settling in, of recuperation, of reconfiguration, and of adventure, but Shelley also felt the frustration of a loss of creativity. He began a play on \u2018Tasso’ but soon abandoned it, turning to Greek translation as a means of compensation \u2013 but producing an outstandingly eloquent and fluent rendering of\u00a0The Symposium<\/em>\u00a0which had a formative influence on subsequent works. While 1818 has little to show for itself in terms of finished products, it was effectively a period of conception and regeneration, and of great receptivity to the classical world as it suggested itself in the remains of antiquity and in the emulation of classical styles in modern architecture. In this regard Shelley was a classicist and not a romanticist, and was always aiming to reach beyond Christianity, much as he admired the ethics of Jesus, whom he regarded as a reformer and not a divine redeemer, and whose tortured representation in Italian painting, and that of his followers, filled him with anguish and disbelief. It was pagan and classical Italy that largely inspired Shelley, and this made an immediate impact in scenes which reminded him of Virgil\u2019s eclogues or the famed scenes at Delphi and Mt Helicon.<\/p>\n Percy Bysshe Shelley in the Baths of Caracalla, Joseph Severn 1845<\/p><\/div>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Prof Alan Weinberg (University of South Africa) has produced this post to mark 200 years since P B Shelley\u2019s journey to Italy \u2013 a crucial turning point in his life,… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2004"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2004"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2004\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2010,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2004\/revisions\/2010"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2004"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2004"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2004"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nPBS.<\/em><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/110527shelleyportrait-640x511.jpeg\")
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