Conclusion

Abstract

Commenting on Shelley’s death on 8 July 1822 and his burial near the pyramid of Cestius in Rome, Geoffrey Matthews remarks that ’[alt about the same age of twenty nine, Wordsworth, who considered Shelley ‘one of the best artists of all’, was just thinking of writing a preface to his Lyrical Ballads’(1970: 33). This statement serves the salutary purpose of putting Shelley’s achievement into perspective. Percy Bysshe Shelley was tragically drowned at an age when others have scarcely begun their careers, having produced in some ten years of serious composition — four of which were spent in Italy — an output of finished poems excellent enough to draw Wordsworth’s impressive tribute. That Wordsworth should have stressed the artist in Shelley is, I think, particularly apt. For, as the present study bears out, Shelley engages the cultural ‘presence’ of the Italian past with the sure instinct of a poet confident of his artistic powers. Shelley rises to the challenge of his forebears, meeting them on their own ground, as it were, and never, it would seem, being daunted by their genius and fame.