Byron and Irish-Italian Freedom on Thursday 21 November at 5 pm

‘[Italy’s] clanking chain, and Erin's yet green wounds’  Byron and Irish-Italian Freedom, a talk by Elisa Cozzi on Thursday 21st November at 5 p.m.

Byron, the most ‘Italian’ among the English Romantics, is also, with P.B. Shelley, the most concerned with Irish politics, people, and ideas. Italy and Ireland are firmly linked together in Byron’s political imagination—a connection that is not incidental: in the Romantic Period, the analogies between Ireland and Italy are remarkably strong, as the two countries were both grappling with foreign rule, struggling for freedom and independence, and shaping their respective national, cultural, and religious identities. At various stages, Byron’s literary output reinforced these connections: his early parliamentary speech on Catholic Emancipation, the ‘Irish’ Preface of The Corsair, the Irish backstory of Beppo, the Dedication to Don Juan (from which I have taken my title), the verse satire ‘The Irish Avatar’, and the prose fragments ‘Detached Thoughts’, as well as his correspondence with the Irish poet Thomas Moore, and his Conversations with the Anglo-Irish Lady Blessington, stage intricate sets of Irish-Italian connections and develop a conception of Italy and Ireland as mirror-images of each other’s quest for liberty and nationhood.   

‘Byron and Italy’ constitutes a fertile critical branch of Romantic Studies, yet the extent of scholarly attention devoted to Byron’s engagement with Ireland is still limited to his friendship with Thomas Moore, and his wide-ranging literary, political, and personal Irish connections are yet to be thoroughly investigated. My talk will chart the emergence of Byron’s joint Irish and Italian interests from his time as a member of the Whig Holland House Circle in London (which provided a platform for the dissemination of works by the Irish poet Thomas Moore and the Italian patriot Ugo Foscolo), to his Italian exile and his friendship with Irish expatriates such as the Dante scholar John Taaffe and Lady Blessington in the last three years of his life. 

Elisa Cozzi is a doctoral student in English Language and Literature at the Queen’s College, University of Oxford. Her research explores the literary connections between Italy and Ireland in the Romantic Period, with a focus on recovering the writings of the Irish expatriates who were part of the extended Byron-Shelley circle in Pisa, such as Margaret Mason, George Tighe, and John Taaffe. Elisa was the recipient of a Keats Shelley Association of America Pforzheimer Grant in 2021 and of a visiting fellowship from Queen Mary University of London in 2023. Her articles and reviews have appeared (or are forthcoming) in Romanticism, The Keats-Shelley Review, and European Romantic Review.