10. ‘Thy Wreck a Glory’: Venice, Subjectivity, and Temporality in Byron and Shelley and the Post-Romantic Imagination

For the Romantic and Post-Romantic imagination, Venice as both historical place and a-temporal myth, the realised and unrealisable city, is central to a poetics of temporality and selfhood in Byron and Shelley. It is the real and unreal city that commingles its solid architectural structures with watery insubstantiality, myth with history, personal memory with historical monument, and poetic artistry with the writing of history. Byron’s poetic reflections on a former self and ‘Venice, lost and won’ (Childe Harold, IV). Shelley qualifies any Byronic optimistic sense of spiritual or cultural restoration with an abiding infernally nightmarish vision of a corrupted, and corrupting, but not quite fallen Venice. Historically Byron and Shelley acknowledge that Venice is lost, but her presence persists in their a-temporal poetic re-imaginings of her former glory. Venice’s self-preserving and self-destructive myth holds an abiding fascination for the Romantic imagination and it poetics of subjectivity: a city at once darkly illuminative that exists as a utopian ideal and a corrupt reality, as a regal yet usurped power, existing within and outside of history. An impossible architectural city of imaginative possibilities that for Byron and Shelley, as well as Nietzsche and Calvino after them, is a perpetually charmed spot and broken spell.