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Venice Redefined
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 December 2019
Venice is a pure signifier: ‘a form in which men unceasingly put meaning (which they extract at will from their knowledge, their dreams, their history), without this meaning thereby ever being finite or fixed’.1 The tendency of succeeding generations to define and redefine the city has left poetry written in Venice immediately after the European Peace caught in a critical penumbra. Romantic poetry set in Venice has been regarded as ‘remote from contemporary life’, often mistaken for the Grand Tour accounts which preceded it or the ‘wistful Venetophilia’ of the Victorians.2 But the cultural pull of Venice from 1817 to 1819 produced a literature distinct from the aesthetic fascination of Ruskin or Proust; Byron and Shelley entered a state occupied for the second time in a decade, which provided on one hand an encounter with the strictures of post-Metternich Europe, and on the other the freedom of a demi-monde with traditional links to the carnivalesque.
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