Coleridge in Italy

Coleridge was involved in Italian culture in ways which many of his contemporaries ignored. Edoardo Zuccato explodes the common categorisation of the elder Romantics as "German" and the younger as "Italian" and shows how Italian Renaissance poets and painters helped develop Coleridge's theory of imagination. Coleridge's reading of Italian lyric poetry ranged from Dante to Metastasio, but the most significant experience for him was Petrarch who influenced his love poetry after 1804 and led him to reconsider classicist poetics. The fine arts were involved in the process, and, even if his artistic opinions were conservative, painting was the only other art besides poetry to which he applied his critical theory. Zuccato argues that a satisfactory cultural history of the period ought to consider similarities as well as differences between the two generations of Romantics. This important contribution to our knowledge of the period sheds light on both Coleridge's intellectual life and the history of Italy and English Romanticism.