MASQUES FOR SHELLEY, BYRON AND KEATS
Why an Italian trilogy?
I was an art student plotting my next move when I was invited to participate in a summer school in the Golfo dei Poeti, Italy. On the Isola Palmaria, where we were based, I began to hear stories, often told by locals, of Byron’s cave, of Shelley’s drowning and his pagan beach cremation further down the coast. Later I learned of the death of Keats in Rome. This was my introduction to the Romantics and this is where poetry first came alive for me.
I was as fascinated by who they were and how they lived as much as I was by what they wrote; their extravagantly brief lives, their rejection of authority and conformity, their antagonism with the establishment and conflict with the pervading manners and fashions of the day. I spent the next months travelling in Italy, pavement drawing and selling architectural sketches with their roving poet ghosts accompanying me on a journey through antiquity. The question of why they had chosen Italy remained.
NEXT: What is a Masque? →
JAN NOBLE 