Climbing the Slopes of Poetry: The Alps in the Works of Wordsworth, Shelley and Byron

Abstract

In the eighteenth century the Alps became one of the most favourite destinations of many young British travellers. Most of them were wealthy men who chose to take the so-called Grand Tour, a long journey across Europe that strongly contributed to the growth of the their mind. In 1790 the romantic poet William Wordsworth took the Grand Tour with his friend the Reverend Robert Johnson. In 1816, when a new conception of travelling was developing, Shelley and Byron, two Romantic poets of the second generation and Wordsworth’s literary successors both visited the Alps. The purpose of my thesis is twofold. I delineate the approach of these three Romantic poets to the Alps. Then, I illustrate to what extent their experience of the sublime and the beautiful objects on the mountains contributed to influence their feelings and their conception of the physical and of the metaphysical world. To attain these aims I decided to devote the first chapter to discuss Edmund Burke’s treaty A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, in order to offer a proper definition of the concepts of the sublime and of the beautiful, which recur all over my work, together with the idea of the picturesque. As a matter of fact, each of the three poets reacts to the Alpine sublimity in a different way, as their perception of sublimity and beauty are not the same. In Wordsworth’s Descriptive Sketches and in the sixth book of The Prelude emerges the lyric I’s eagerness to provide topographical and hyperbolic descriptions of the Alps, that recall some of the paintings by William Turner, which I briefly comment. Moreover, Wordsworth’s lyric I is mainly passive in front of the Alpine nature, which he conceives as a sublime and divine creation. In his Hymn to Intellectual Beauty and his Mount Blanc, Shelley goes a step further than Wordsworth. The descriptions that he offers are still very precise and evocative, but the lyric I holds the sublimity of the Alps and, in particular of Mount Blanc, as a veil that hides a supernatural and divine Power, with which he desperately tries to communicate. Finally, the Byronic Heroes of the third canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and of Manfred seek satisfaction, redemption and forgiveness through the sublime and beautiful Alpine landscape. Whatever their perception of the sublimity and of the beauty of the Alps, their stay on the mountains left an indelible mark not only on these poets’ memories and literary production, but also in their own philosophy and in their relationship with the surrounding nature.