From Petrarch to Dante : the discourse of disenchantment in Shelley's The triumph of life

Abstract

Ever since A.C. Bradley and F.M. Stawell recorded numerous echoes of Dante and Petrarch in Shelley's The Triumph of Life nearly eighty years ago, scholars have concentrated their attention on the nature of Shelley's debt to these poets - a debt that has been confirmed by no less a critic than T.S. Eliot, who claimed it was Shelley's most Dantesque poem. However, the credit for establishing Dantean influence should go to John Taaffe, a cultured Irishman and a somewhat bumptious member of Shelley's Pisan circle who, in his annotations of the first Pisan edition of Adonais, personally sent to him by Shelley, perceived the impact of Dante's Paradiso (and to a lesser extent the Purgatorio) on Shelley's poetic symbolism - the 'splendour-fragrance' and 'star-flower' configurations which embroider the texture of Shelley's pastoral elegy on the death of Keats. Taaffe, it will be recalled, had written his Comment on the 'Divine Commedy' of Dante Alighieri with Shelley's help, and this treatise was eventually published by John Murray in 1822 on Byron's insistence . His discerning of the Dantean echoes inAdonais, as Richard Fogle's commentary shows, is revealing in the light it throws on Shelley's method of poetic composition