The Italy of the English romantic poets

The object of this thesis is to study the Italian experience of the major English poets who are commonly termed Romantic, that is, Who flourished in the High Romantic period of 1790-1825. These are recognised to be Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Blake, but as my concern is with actual experience of Italy, and not simply a poetic image of it, I have restricted the present enquiry to the three of these six who recorded their impressions of country and people in detail - Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley. Of Coleridge' s being in Sicily and Rome in the years 1804-06, we have little account, beyond the hints in his Biographia Literaria (1817). Keats in 1821 was too tormented by his near death to take in Naples or Rome. The "Italy" Blake knew remained a visionary thing.The present work is intended as a oontribution to both Romantic scholarship and the history of the Englishman in Italy; for it is a study of the nature and importance of Italian experience for Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley, considered collectively as well as individually. Numerous works have been published with, say, Byron's years in Italy, or Shelley' s, as their subject, but I have not encountered any that has attempted a comprehensive picture of both, and also of Wordsworth's notable visits. To present this is the aim of the present work.The findings of my research require that the form of this thesis should be as follows:- a first Chapter, in which it is demonstrated that the interest in Classical Italy which was manifested in the celebrated 'Grand Tour' throughout the eighteenth century, continued into the nineteenth, and that it is this which lends a certain common character to the Italian experience of our Romantics; separate Chapters on Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley, in which it is suggested how far their accounts of Italy were the traditional English account, and how far individual; finally, a conclusion, in which the Italy of the Romantics will be defined, both in itself, and by comparison with those known to Englishmen in other ages