DECLINING GLORY
UGO POSCOLO, by E. R. Vincent; Cambridge University Press. English price, 25/-. [so FOSCOLO, poet and patriot, was a strange wanderer to come to rest in Regency England. The natural sympathy of the Holland House Whigs for anyone who had resisted tyranny so strenuously i in eloquence and in arms. in his native country, enhanced by a sense of his real intellectual distinction. was soon diminished (though not =- tinguished) by acquaintance with Foscolo’s temperament (more accurately. his temper) and his complete inability to live within a meagre income derived from spasmodic journalism. An Italian political exile who was half-Greek, Foscolo came to England bathed in Byronic glory. His English years are the years of decline and fall, and Professor Vincent’s pedestrian and rather scrappy biographical sketch of these last years of the poet’s life before his death in poverty creates a sense of discomfort in the reader-the same sort of feeling that
Baudelaire describes in his poem™about the albatross, emperor of the air, taken by the sailors, swaying drunkenly on the deck of the ship, its great wings preventing it from walking.
David
Hall
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 735, 14 August 1953, Page 13
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186DECLINING GLORY New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 735, 14 August 1953, Page 13
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