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

Abstract

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.