Shelley and Greece

Shelley and Greece a public talk by Dr Will Bowers on Thursday 6th November at 5 pm

Shelley’s interest in Ancient Greece began in earnest on the banks of the Thames at Marlow in 1817, and it endured until his final days on the Bay of Spezia in 1822. The talk will open with an outline of Shelley’s approach to Greek literature and its reception, before considering how this might profitably be thought of as plastic and iconoclastic. We then turns to consider Shelley’s time in Naples—under Vesuvius and among the excavated remnants of Magna Graecia—a place from which we can sift and test his Hellenism. We will look at Shelley’s remarkable letters to Thomas Love Peacock from the city and its sights, and the ‘Ode to Naples’, which meditates on our classical inheritance in a form and a place heavy with the weight of tradition. These readings aim to appreciate the revitalising function of Shelley’s Greek, whereby the ancient past is recruited both to question our cultural present and to speculate on alternative futures.

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. 

Will Bowers is Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Thought at Queen Mary, University of London. His first monograph, The Italian Idea,  was published in 2020 by Cambridge University Press, and won the European Society for the Study of English Prize for a first book in 2022. He is an editor on final two volumes of the Longman Annotated Poems of Shelley, and he is currently editing the works of William Cowper for Oxford World’s Classics and thinking about a book about Naples.