“The newly unfrozen senses”: Restoring Physical Dimensions to the Italianate Shelley

Abstract

ABSTRACT Thanks to the efforts of historicist critics, Percy Shelley’s Italian travel writings have been situated in diverse contexts of Romantic Europe. In so historicizing the Italianate Shelley, however, those critics tended to overlook the ways in which Shelley’s empirical phenomenology of nature was variedly conditioned and constantly developed through his physical experiences. This essay relocates Shelley to the very physical milieu of his Italian tour. First, referring to Shelley’s letters and poems written during his early Italian period, I will show how his exposure to the mild southern climate transformed him from a transcendental to a more empirical poet of nature. Second, considering Staël’s Corinne as a major influence on Shelley’s view of Italy, I will demonstrate that the poet’s ascent of Vesuvius revolutionized his imagined geography, the Italian nation emerging out of his empirically constructed phenomenal world. Thus, this essay argues that Shelley’s physical experiences of Italy caused a fundamental change in his self-image and in the tenor of his poetry. Furthermore, it seeks to pave the way for a new physical plane of Shelley criticism, where the poet can constantly evolve and transform by traversing the empirical realm of Romantic Europe.