Byron

Abstract

Wordsworth learnt Italian from the exile Isola at Cambridge and loved Italy all his life, but his ‘Italian’ poetry is for the most part disappointing. The elegiac sonnet On The Extinction of the Venetian Republic (‘Once did She hold the gorgeous East in fee’), written in 1802, is the most memorable of his Italian writings, and doubtless contributed to the Romantic image of Venice as the city of recently departed grandeur; but otherwise one cannot but regret that Wordsworth did not visit Italy while at the height of his poetic powers. In his walking tour of 1790 he went only as far as Lake Como, whose beauty he recorded in The Prelude (Book 6, 660–726); in 1820 he went to Milan; but it was not until 1837, at the age of sixty-seven, that he made an extended tour of Italy with Crabb Robinson. But he was, for example, ‘indifferent’¹ to Venice, and the poetry which resulted from these visits has very little interest; and even in the more spontaneous mode of letter writing he fails to display very much enthusiasm for what he is seeing.²