ABSTRACT
In this essay I want to reconsider conversations about Lord Byron and Percy Shelley in the courtship and early married poetic partnership of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning. 1 I want to look beyond the local effects of literary allusion at the ways in which Byron’s and Shelley’s concerns about the poet’s humanity are reconfigured and re-played by the Romantic Victorians who followed them into exile in Italy. I am interested in the possibility that poets might deal with influence collectively: how influence might work through fellowship, rather than competition and anxiety. Work by Beth Lau, Lucy Newlyn and Jane Spencer has helpfully complicated monolithic notions of reception, but what William D. Brewer called the “Shelley-Byron conversation” still tends to be studied in relation to their influence on individuals. 2
