Shelley’s “Letter to Maria Gisborne” as Workshop Poetry
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2019
Keywords
garret, invention, poetry, Percy Bysshe Shelley, steamboat, verse epistle, workshop
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.1080/10848770.2018.1562666
Abstract
Shelley’s “Letter to Maria Gisborne” is a playful improvisational verse epistle, widely praised for its urbanity and its display of the poet’s invention. The verses turn on a catalogue of the collection of odd scientific and mechanical objects that Shelley found scattered around him in the place he composed the letter, the Livorno workshop of Gisborne’s son, a young engineer who was building a new-model steamboat at the time (with Shelley’s financial and intellectual backing). In the context of that space, the poem reads as a response to competing notions of invention. For Shelley, the engineer’s workshop is an attractive alternative to the poet’s tower—which was uncomfortably close to a Grub Street garret. Verbal and visual images of poets’ and scientists’ workshops, from Hogarth and Mary Robinson, to Joseph Wright of Derby and Frankenstein, illustrate the tensions embodied in the physical location and poetic performance of Shelley’s celebrated “Letter.”
Was this content written or created while at USF?
Yes
Citation / Publisher Attribution
The European Legacy, v. 24, issue 3-4, p. 380-395
Scholar Commons Citation
Jones, Steven E., "Shelley’s “Letter to Maria Gisborne” as Workshop Poetry" (2019). English Faculty Publications. 291.
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/eng_facpub/291
