Tag: British poets

There was a particular time in history during which British poets flourished. Shelley, Lord Byron and their compatriots wrote some of the world’s best poetry to date.

Percy Bysshe Shelley remains one of my favorite British poets for his lyricism and depth so when I found out I was heading to Milan, I knew which two small books I would take with me so that I could sit in the same spot in the Duomo di Milano and read Dante, just as he did. He describes the experience in “one solitary spot among those aisles behind the altar, where the light of day is dim and yellow under the storied window.” The books I took and read in this same dim and yellow spot were Shelley’s Letters from Italy and Dante’s La Vita Nuova.

In his letters, Shelley described the cathedral as “a most astonishing work of art,” adding: “It is built of white marble, and cut into pinnacles of immense height, and the utmost delicacy of workmanship, and loaded with sculpture. The effect of it, piercing the solid blue with those groups of dazzling spires, relieved by the serene depth of this Italian heaven, or by moonlight when the stars seem gathered away among those clustered shapes, is beyond anything I had imagined architecture capable of producing.” I was reading the descriptions just four days shy of the date he had sat reading inside the Choice 197 years before!