ABSTRACT
As several scholars have argued recently, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s relationship to the musical fashions of the early nineteenth century significantly influenced his poetry and his aesthetic principles.1 Because Shelley spent the last several years of his life in Italy and demonstrated a particular interest in Italian opera from 1817 onwards, the music from this national tradition has been read as central to appreciating the lyric investments of Shelley’s late verse compositions. Certainly, Shelley describes an intimate relationship between music and poetry in several of his works, maintaining directly and most famously in the Defence of Poetry (1821) that
Man is an instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing wind over an Aeolian lyre . . . . But there is a principle within the human being . . . which acts otherwise than in the lyre, and produces not melody, alone, but harmony.2
