Records of Shelley, Byron, and the author
By: Edward John Trelawny ; introduction by Anne Barton.
Series: New York Review Books classics
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2000
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 308
Subjects: Trelawny, Edward John, 1792-1881 -- Friends and associates.; Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 1792-1822 -- Last years.; Byron, George Gordon Byron, Baron, 1788-1824 -- Last years.; Adventure and adventurers -- Great Britain -- Biography.; Poets, English -- 19th century -- Biography.; British -- Italy -- History -- 19th century.; Poets, English -- Homes and haunts -- Italy.; Greece -- History -- War of Independence, 1821-1829 -- Biography.; Italy -- Intellectual life -- 1789-1900.
Genres: Biography.
Description: "In 1822, after having been discharged from the British navy, deserted by his wife, and as good as disowned by his father, the thirty-two-year-old Edward John Trelawny set off for Italy to make the acquaintance of his hero, Lord Byron. "I have met today the personification of my Corsair," Byron wrote in a letter. "He sleeps with the poem under his pillow, and all his past adventures and present manners aim at this personification," But though Byron enjoyed the company of his admirer, and was eventually to embark with him on his ill-fated final expedition to aid in the War of Greek Independence, he had grown guarded and ironical with age, and the perfect meeting of minds that Trelawny had envisioned was not to be. Shelley, however, enchanted him. In the months before his death at sea, he and Trelawny were frequent companions, and the young poet emerges from these pages in all his splendid carelessness and other worldly concentration." "Composed and revised over the course of Trelawny's long life and written in fresh and vigorous prose, this famous memoir combines eyewitness testimony and inspired mythmaking to present an unforgettable portrait of two of the greatest poets, and extraordinary characters, of the Romantic age."--BOOK JACKET.