The Circle of Our Vision

The sudden and spectacular growth in Dante's popularity in England at the end of the eighteenth century was immensely influential for English writers of the period. Byron, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Blake, and Wordsworth all wrote and painted while Dante's work commanded their attention and provoked their disagreement. In the first detailed study of the subject, The Circle of Our Vision discusses each of these writers in detail, assessing the nature of their engagement with the Divine Comedy and the consequences for their own writing, and setting them in the context of commentators, translators, and illustrators both in England and Europe.