A Monument... Loftier than the Pyramids

A Monument... Loftier than the Pyramids. Verses Immemorial and Remembrance of Poets
a public talk by Dr Fabio Barry, on Thursday 2nd October at 5 pm

Keats was buried in the shadow of the only pyramid in Rome. On his headstone is a lyre with a broken string and the words “Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water.” Should his poetry not outlive him, Shelley remembered Keats in the 55 stanzas (‘rooms’) of the Adonais. Shelley’s own ashes were interred not far from Keats, but 70 years later he received a grand monument in Oxford, inscribed with quotations from the same elegy.
Poets have always recognised the affinities between architecture and verse, such that Horace claimed his own poetry was “a monument more lasting than bronze and loftier than any pyramid.” This talk will chart the parallel and opposed paths of the monument in verse and stone. It is fitting that it should happen in the Keats-Shelley House. From Pindar and Propertius, Petrarch and Ariosto, to Keats and Shelley, the ideal memorial for the poet was the place where they had lived and died.

Admission is free but booking is required due to the limited number of spaces (please write to info@keats-shelley-house.org).

Entry from 4:45 pm onwards. 

Fabio Barry studied architecture at the University of Cambridge and art history at Columbia University. He has taught at the University of St. Andrews and Stanford University. He has won numerous awards and fellowships. His book Painting in Stone: Architecture and the Poetics of Marble from Antiquity until the Enlightenment (Yale University Press 2020), received several awards, including “Book of the Year” by Apollo Magazine, and the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain.