ABSTRACT
Percy Bysshe Shelley's relationship with Italy is, however, far from being limited to only one aspect. As his poetry and writings reveal, the English poet's response was, at the same time, one of assimilation and rejection, of embracing the past and yet seeking its applicability in the present. Shelley affirmed in 1819 that his epoch was 'the age of generalities', perhaps voicing his discomfort with an age of transition. Shelley's familiarity with Italian politics, and his profound knowledge of Italian literature, was only partially appreciated by his Italian counterparts by the midnineteenth century. Shelley's interest in the Risorgimento was, however, largely ignored by his Italian contemporaries, and his political and social utopianism was discovered only towards the very end of the revolutionary decades. Shelley's poetics were, in fact, partly rediscovered with what Cian Duffy, referring to 'Ode to Naples', describes as Shelley's 'anti-catastrophic history of Italian politics'.
