‘Unapprehended Relations of Things’: Remapping Mind and World in the Poetics of Nature in Byron and Shelley, 1816-1820

This thesis refigures Byron and Shelley’s poetics in relation to current environmental discussions. I examine these two Romantic poets’ engagements with, and treatment of, the Italian landscape primarily in the years 1816-1820, through a vision of interconnection, arguing that everything in the universe is connected and that the conceived divisions between human and nature are a falsity. The ecological vein offers a fresh perspective on the creative interplay and imaginative interaction between Byron and Shelley. The introduction draws on critical studies by Timothy Morton, Jonathan Bate, and Andrew Hubbell as well as philosophical thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Iain McGilchrist and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The introduction also establishes my focus on the Italian landscape (particularly Venice and her environs), and the relevance of Byron and Shelley’s exilic status on their conceptions and portrayals of the natural world. Chapter One considers Byron and Shelley’s vision of history as a cyclical process that reflects the movements of the natural world, centring upon Venice’s turbulent political history and her existence in the imaginary realm. Chapter Two examines the relation between societal corruption and disease with sense and sensation evincing the interconnectivity of all life. Chapter Three takes seriously Byron’s critically neglected arboreal imagery in the context of his uprooted, exilic identity. Chapter Four emphasises the interaction between mind and mountain in Shelley’s ‘Mont Blanc’ as interrogating the anthropocentric viewpoint. Chapter Five continues investigating the interaction between mind and environment, prioritising the relation between states of madness and depression, apocalypse, and ecological breakdown. Chapter Six revisits Venice, paying attention to images of shoresides as representative of Byron and Shelley’s views of the potential of the human soul, and human nature. The Coda offers a means to end our current erroneous detachment from nature in the form of Byron and Shelley’s vision of love as connecting, and re-connecting.