Turning to Dante : Shelley's Adonais reconsidered

Abstract

As often, if not always, in his agonistic creative relationship with Shelley, Byron just about got there first in terms of responding to something of the imaginative range offered by Dante's example, even if the roughly contemporaneous Prometheus Unbound is a more impressive instance of a comparable phenomenon. In The Prophecy of Dante, composed in 1819 but published in 1821, Byron writes from the persona of Dante: a bold move that allows for a sense of veiled autobiography. In places we suspect we are dealing with the Noble Lord as much as the Florentine poet. 'For I have been too long and deeply wreck' d / On the lone rock of desolate Despair' (I. 138-139) catches the throwing-it-all-to-the-winds cadence of for 'I have thought / Too long and darkly, till my brain became,/ In its own eddy boiling and o'er wrought,/ A whirling gulf of phantasy and flame' of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (3. 55-58).