ABSTRACT

Several draft verse fragments, whose subject, locality or reference is discernibly Italian in character, were written over the course of the poet’s residence in Italy. ‘The Triumph’ once languished among Shelley’s most seriously neglected poems, it is now ironically considered among the best known and admired, a reputation well deserved as it is a work of towering stature, albeit incomplete. Occupying Shelley from the moment he arrived in Italy, the project of ‘a tragedy on the subject of Tasso’s madness’, which he expected to take several months to complete, appears to have been suspended at Bagni di Lucca in July 1818, and may well have been dropped once the character of Tasso was recast in the Maniac of ‘Julian and Maddalo’. Shelley was accommodating his mind to the historical and mythic undercurrents of Italy, searching out their silent recesses, and he did so without conforming to conventional tastes.