The Byron Study Centre
Centre for Regional Literature and Culture
University of Nottingham
www.nottingham.ac.uk/crlc/groups/byron
Lord Byron and the Della Cruscans
by Silvia Bordoni, The University of Nottingham 2006
The Della Cruscans' Anglo-Italian Poetics
The Della Cruscans were a coterie of English poets formed in Italy in 1785, when Robert Merry, Bertie Greatheed,
William Parsons and Hester Thrale Piozzi found themselves in Florence, 'idly enjoying the Italian sunshine' (British
Satire, 142). Greatheed was a wealthy English landowner, who lived in Italy between 1783 and 1785, while
Parsons had lived in Bath most of his life and was travelling Italy in 1785. Hester Thrale was already a well-known
intellectual by the time she married the Italian musician Gabriel Piozzi and moved to Florence in 1783, having
written pieces for the St. James's Chronicle and about to publish her Glimpses of the Italian Society (1786).
Robert Merry was to become the most famous member of the Della Cruscans; he had left England in 1784 to
escape gambling debts, and travelled for some years through Europe before settling in Florence.
The first poetical production of this literary circle was The Arno Miscellany (1784), to which all the original
members, except Parsons, contributed. The Arno Miscellany was a short collection of occasional poems privately
printed, and which circulated only among a small number of friends. However, it was The Florence Miscellany,
published a year after, which became the founding document of Della Cruscanism. This, like The Arno Miscellany,
was a collection of occasional poems, printed in Florence by the local publisher G. Cam. Parsons seems to have
acted as the collection's editor, and he contributed to the majority of the poetical pieces (thirty-one out of sixtyone), followed by Merry, Piozzi and Greatheed. The Florence Miscellany also contained several pieces by Italian
poets, such as Ippolito Pindemonte, Lorenzo Pignotti, Angelo d'Elci, Giuseppe Parini and Marco Lastri, and a
concluding serenata by Gabriel Piozzi.
In the Preface to The Florence Miscellany, Hester Piozzi clearly sets the tone and intent of the collection. As she
explains, 'we wrote [the verses] to divert ourselves, and to say kind things of each other; we collected them that
our reciprocal expressions of kindness might not be lost, and we printed them because we had no reason to be
ashamed of our mutual partiality' (BS, 142). In Piozzi's words, the collection was meant to be only a past-time, an
amateurish writing of poems addressed to each other and not meant for publication. The contributors, Piozzi
continues, have no ambition to success, and they are aware that their book of poetry will have little influence on
the present and future generations of readers:
Our little Book can scarcely be less important to the waters of a mineral spring which sparkle in the glass, and
exhilarate the spirits of those who drink them on the spot, grow vapid and tasteless by carriage and keeping, until
we could find something important and instructive to say, we shall at least be allow'd to have glisten'd innocently
in Italian sunshine. (BS 142)
Piozzi's demystifying preface is accompanied by Parsons's less defensive and more provocative Dedication.
Parsons, like Piozzi, highlights the fact that The Florence Miscellany seeks neither the support nor the approval of
the public. His comments do, however, enter a political dimension:
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We mean not our book for the public inspection,
Then why should we court e'en a Monarch's protection?
For too oft the good Prince such a critic of lays is,
He scarcely knows how to peruse his own praises.
OURSELVES and our FRIENDS we for Patrons will chuse,
No others will read us and these will excuse. (BS, 141)
The jocosity of Parson's tone hides a problematic political situation of which the Della Cruscans were clearly aware.
The name Della Crusca, in fact, has a political connotation: it was meant to commemorate the suppression of the
liberal Accademia della Crusca by Duke Leopold of Tuscany in 1783, thus symbolising the opposition of the poets
to the repressive Tuscan government of their day. In this context, Parson's Dedication acquires an important
political significance, which is to pronounce The Florence Miscellany and its contributors free from the Duke's
patronage, therefore transforming it from a collection of occasional and intimate poetry to a literary space
promoting free poetical and political expression.
The Anglo-Italian collaboration is an important aspect of the original the Della Cruscan movement. As Michael
Gamer observes, the nature of the Della Cruscans was determinedly internationalist and poetically hybrid. Besides
poems by the English components of the movement, The Florence Miscellany contained poems in Italian and
French, translations from the most famous Italian authors, such as Dante and Petrarch, and imitations of famous
Italian poetic forms, such as the sonnet and the elegy. The book was one of the first important eighteenth-century
English engagements with Italian poetry, anticipating later experimentation with Italian improvisation, and with
forms such as ottava and terza rima. In Italy, The Florence Miscellany was enthusiastically received by critics, who
tended to emphasise the importance of this Anglo-Italian literary collaboration. In Novelle Letterarie (1785), for
example, Marco Lastri, an Italian member of the Della Cruscans, comments:
Rara combinazione e gloriosa per la Nazione Inglese! Quattro viaggiatori, o Cavalieri erranti, tra i quali una Dama,
lasciato il Tamigi, s'incontrarono accidentalmente sull'Arno, dove in quell'aura stessa che rispondeva un tempo alle
voci armoniche di Dante e del Petrarca, risponde alle loro, essendo tutti e quattro Poeti.
It is a rare and glorious combination for the English nation! Four travellers, or wandering 'Knights', among which a
Lady, left the Thames and accidentally met on the river Arno, where, the same air that had once responded to the
harmonious voice of Dante and Petrarch, now respond to their voice, being all four Poets. (673-676)
The passage clearly presents the Della Cruscans in terms of Anglo-Italian collaboration. The connection is made
even more explicit by the creation of an imaginary poetical dialogue between the English Della Cruscans and the
two most famous Italian poets: Dante and Petrarch. The Florence Miscellany is actually marked by the influence of
the Italian literary tradition of courtly love and erotic verse, and it can thereby be associated with eighteenthcentury sentimental literature, which Thomas Sterne, one of the key progenitors of this tradition, himself linked to
Italy in his A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy.
Although The Florence Miscellany was printed in Florence, it soon began to arouse interest in England. The
European Magazine republished poetry from the Miscellany in 1786, and when Robert Merry returned to England
the same year, he found himself famous. However, it was not until 1787, when Merry was invited to contribute to
The World with poetical pieces, that the Della Cruscan vogue began to make significant headway in England. His
first poem, 'The Adieu and Recall to Love', a sentimental piece on love's pleasures and pains, was published in
June 1787 under the pseudonym of 'Della Crusca'. A fortnight later, The World published a poem in reply to
Merry's piece, which was signed 'Anna Matilda'. From then on, Della Crusca and Anna Matilda started an idealised
correspondence in the pages of The World, and initiated a vogue for poetical contributions. To Anna Matilda,
actually the famous poet and dramatist Hannah Cowley, were added Laura Maria (Mary Robinson), Benedict
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(Edward Jerningham), Reuben (Greatheed) and many others. John Bell, the editor of The World, later collected the
Merry-Cowley correspondence in The Poetry of the World, which was published in 1788, and which by 1790
reached the fourth edition, The British Album, in two volumes.
The Della Cruscans' poetry is characterised by a strong sentimental vein, which tends to imitate a Renaissance
language of love and artifice. The poem usually begins with an imaginary physical description of the addressed
lover, which progressively acquires an erotic tone. In this way, the short space of the poem frames the description
of the lovers' encounter and of the consummation of their passion. Here is, for example, Della Crusca's address to
Anna Matilda (1787):
I know thee well, enchanting maid,
I've mark'd thee in the silent glade,
I've seen thee on the mountain's height,
I've met thee in the storms of night;
[.]
O then, in varying colours drest,
And living glory stand confest,
Shake from thy lock ambrosial dew
And thrill each pulse of joy a-new;
With glowing ardours rouse my soul,
And bid the tides of Passion roll. (BS 158)
The mingling of physicality and idealism makes the Della Cruscans' poetry erotically veiled. The anonymity of the
authors, on the other hand, makes their poetry particularly appealing to readers, who can easily identify with
these exchanges of reciprocal esteem and attraction. Anna Matilda's reply to this poem was published in The World
only four days later. The rapidity of composition gives to the Della Cruscans' poetry a spontaneity which has often
been associated with improvisation. The same Hanna Cowley (Anna Matilda) frequently calls attention to the speed
of her compositions, adding subtitles such as 'sent just forty hours after the publication of the preceding', and
constantly placing herself in the attitude of having just finished reading Della Crusca's poems. Anna Matilda's reply
celebrates the sensual awakening that Della Crusca's poem has created in her, describing its spiritual and physical
effects:
Thou bidst!- 'my purple slumbers fly!'
Day's radiance pours upon my eye.
I wake- I live! The sense o'erpays
The trivial grief of early days.
What! Tho' the rose-bud on my cheek
Has shed its leaves, which late so sleek,
Spoke youth, and joy- and careless thought,
By guilt, or fear, or shame unsmote;
My blooming soul is yet in youth,
Its lively sense attests the truth. (BS 160)
Contemporary criticisms generally observed how the Della Cruscans' poetry was too rich and elaborate, often
overwhelming the readers with erudite references and artificial imagery. A Monthly Review critic, for example,
writes of Merry's poetry: 'simplicity is lost in refinement. Nature and ease are buried under a load of artificial
ornament, and cumbrous difficulty'; he also describes Merry's phraseology as 'affectedly, obscurely, and in some
cases, unintelligibly, fine' (Pascoe, 72). The mannerism of the Della Cruscan poetry, especially in its initial phase,
however, is linked to seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Italian poetry, which was promoted by the
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Accademia della Crusca as exemplary of the purity and variety of the Italian language, against the spreading of
foreign terminologies and dialects.
The Della Cruscan Influence on Byron's Early Works
Jerome McGann was the first to acknowledge the influence of Della Cruscan poetics on Byron's poetry. Byron
composed his early poetry at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the Della Cruscans were still popular.
Hours of Idleness (1807), Byron's first important collection of poems, contained mainly occasional verse, often
addressed to a lady or a lover, characterised by a sentimental vein and by a thinly veiled eroticism popularised by
the Della Cruscans. Byron wrote most of the poems in reply to specific events, such as the receipt of an
invitation,- or a present; other poems were written in reply to letters or poems. The occasional nature of these
poems, which were often addressed to people he had sporadically met, makes Byron's early poetry similar to Della
Cruscans'. Moreover, by creating similar circumstances of composition, Byron reconstructs the same epistolary
frame that characterises the Della Cruscan poetry. In 'To Caroline', the influence of the Renaissance poetics of
courtly love, reinvigorated by the Della Cruscans, is clearly visible:
Think'st thou, I saw thy beauteous eyes,
Suffus'd in tears, implore to stay;
And heard unmov'd, thy plenteous sighs,
Which said far more than words can say?
Though keen the grief, thy tears exprest,
When love, and hope, lay both o'erthrown,
Yet still, my girl, this bleeding breast,
Throbb'd, with deep sorrow, as thine own.
But, when our cheeks with anguish glow'd,
When thy sweet lips were join'd to mine;
The tears, that from my eye-lids flow'd,
Were lost in thosewhich fell from thine.
Byron continues by describing Caroline's cheeks and lips as burning with an unfortunate passion for him. The Della
Cruscans' early poetry makes a very similar use of the traditional fifteenth- and sixteenth-century language of
courtly love, exaggerating, and often mocking, this literary mode. Although more chastened, Benedict's 'Sonnet to
Melissa' describes the lovers' kiss in similarly erotic tone:
Dear Lips! -permit my trembling lips to press
Your ripen'd softness, in a tender kiss:
And, while my throbbing heart avows the bliss,
Will you- (dear lips) the eager strangers bless? (BS, 172)
The fact that Byron's early poems are addressed to women whom he had met or with whom he had liaisons,
makes his verse more realistic, whilst his decision to use the name of a female addressee as the title for several of
these, is clearly indebted to the Della Cruscans' practice. The choice of common names as titles, such as 'To
Caroline', 'To Emma', 'To Marion', 'To Mary', helps to preserve the anonymity, but also to promote the female
readers' identification with the poems' addressees.
Della Cruscanism and Byron's Later Works
As Jerome McGann has pointed out, it took Byron less than a year to break off his literary link to Della
Cruscanism, though some influences can still be perceived in his later production. By 1807, in fact, when he wrote
English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, he had clearly moved on from the sentimental tradition into satire,
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travelogue and heroic poetry. The negative reviews that Hours of Idleness had received in The Edinburgh Review
(1807) and in The Satirist (1807), convinced him to abandon sentimental poetry and Della Cruscanism. By then,
the Della Cruscan poetry was considered to be too effeminate and too exotic to appeal to English readers, and
Byron had perceived that the literary market needed a new, more 'masculine', kind of poetry.
The way Byron criticizes the Della Cruscans in English Bards emulates Gifford's critique in The Baviad (1791). In
his Preface to English Bards, Byron compares the spreading of the Della Cruscan sentimental poetry to a
widespread malady, and he praises Gifford for having found an effective cure 'to prevent the extension of so
deplorable an epidemic'. He presents English Bards as another possible treatment of such 'malady', one that 'can
recover the numerous patients afflicted with the present prevalent and distressing rabies for rhyming' (Poetical
Works, I, 228-29). After describing the Della Cruscan poetry, embodied by Rosa Matilda, as 'prose in masquerade/
whose strains, the faithful echoes of her mind/leave wandering comprehension far behind', he proceeds to
elaborate on the persistence of this sentimental strain:
Though Crusca's bards no more our journals fill,
Some stragglers skirmish round the columns still,
Last of the howling host which once was Bell's,
Matilda snivels yet, and Hafiz yells,
And Merry's metaphors appear anew,
Chained to the signature of O.P.Q.( 759-64)
The comparison between Della Cruscanism and an epidemic was itself suggested by Gifford. After describing the
circumstances in which the Della Cruscans met in Florence, and after lamenting that 'Yendas, and Laura Marias,
and Tony Pasquins, have long claimed a prescriptive right to infest our periodical publications', Gifford compares
Della Cruscanism to an epidemic coming from the South:
The first cargo of poetry arrived from Florence [.] and was given to the public through the medium of this
favourite paper [The World]. There was a specious brilliancy in these exotics which dazzled the native grubs, who
had scarce ever ventured beyond a sheep, and a crook, and a rose-tree grove, with an ostentatious display of
'blue skies', and 'crashing torrents', and 'petrifying suns' [.] From admiration to imitation is but a step. Honest
Yenda tried his hand at a descriptive ode, and succeeded beyond his hopes; Anna Matilda followed [.] The fever
turned to frenzy: Laura Maria, Carlos, Orlando, Adelaide, and a thousand nameless names caught the infection;
and from one kingdom to the other, all was nonsense and Della Crusca. (BS, 4-5)
In Gifford's words, Della Crusca, as initiator of the movement, caught this 'infectious disease' in Italy and brought
it to England. However, even after its contamination of the body of national letters, it did not lose its foreignness,
as all the participants took on exotic names. When we come to the poetical text of The Baviad itself, Gifford makes
it clear that women, especially Piozzi and her 'bluestocking'd friends' (45-46), played a key role in the creation and
spreading of this new poetry. When Gifford complains of 'a specious brilliancy in these exotics, which dazzled the
native grubs', therefore, he clearly suggests the idea of not only an exotic, but, in particular, a feminized poetry
which colonizes a stronger - more masculine - native strain.
Byron's criticism of the Della Cruscan poetry, however, seems to be limited to its oversentimentalism and to its
diffusion amongst readers and writers, especially women, a fact which contributed to the popularisation and
feminisation of the process of writing poetry. The fact that Byron does not highlight the foreignness of the Della
Cruscan poetry as a problem is, however, notable, especially in the evaluation of the Della Cruscans' influence on
his later poetics. Byron's decision to use Italian literature and culture as an important component of his AngloEuropean perspective may well have been influenced by Della Cruscan poetry and its engagement with Italian
literature. As Michael Gamer has observed, the Della Cruscans were the first to experiment with the Italian ottava
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and terza rima with a satirical intent, thus trying to combine the English language with the Italian style, and
creating a poetics of hybridism which Byron would later develop in Childe Harold, Beppo and Don Juan.
The Della Cruscans were also the first to use an improvisatory style derived from the Italian improvisatori.
Although not a fan of improvisation (Medwin, 136-138), Byron often comments that his acts of composition are
similar to improvisations. Childe Harold and the 'Oriental Tales', for example,perfected that 'improvisatory' style
which Byron had first attempted in Hours of Idleness: 'I feel [that 'our' art] comes over me in a kind of rage [...]
and [.] if I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. [.] I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never a
pleasure' (L&J, VIII, 55). Similarly, commenting on the composition of Don Juan, Byron insists on the
improvisatory aspect of the poem: 'I have no plan - I had no plan - but I have or had materials' (L&J, VI, 207).
Byron's emphasis on improvisation clearly alludes to a Mediterranean poetics of passion and spontaneity, which
was becoming popular at the beginning of the nineteenth-century and which had first been introduced in England
by the Della Cruscans.
The Della Cruscans' influence on Byron's poetics, however, is not limited to stylistic choices. Gifford's famous
critique has completely obscured the Della Cruscans' engagement with Italian and French politics. Indeed, as
noted above, the Della Cruscans were first created not simply, as Gifford comments, 'to while away an afternoon',
but as a political reaction against the cultural imperialism of Austria. Besides poems on love and friendship, The
Florence Miscellany also contained political verse, in defiance of Austrian censorship. Furthermore, as John
Strachan has recently commented, by 1790 Della Cruscan poetry was deeply involved in radical politics, espousing
the cause of the French Revolution. Published in 1790, Robert Merry's The Laurel of Liberty was one of the earliest
examples of English poetical Jacobinism. The same year, when she was still writing as Laura Maria in the pages of
The World, Mary Robinson wrote Ainsi va le Monde as a response to Merry's Laurel.
The Della Cruscans were, moreover, the first to call British attention to the political situation of Italy. Byron's
interest in Italian politics, and in anti-imperialistic politics in general, follows the Della Cruscans' opening up of an
international perspective in British politics and poetry. Therefore, Byron's engagement with the Italian fight for
independence, and with European politics in general, can be seen, in part, as a continuation of the Della Cruscans'
political versification. As a matter of fact, Byron's creation in 1822 of the The Liberal is clearly linked to the Della
Cruscans' early poetical activity in Italy. Like The Florence Miscellany, The Liberal was created by a group of
English exiles in Italy and it was promoted as an Anglo-Italian journal. Its purpose, like The Florence Miscellany's,
was to popularise the contributors' poetical compositions and to make the political situation of Italy known to
British readers. The link is confirmed by the contribution to The Liberal of Marco Lastri, an Italian writer, who had
formerly been part of The Florence Miscellany.
Byron always denied any engagement with Della Cruscanism, especially after Gifford had utterly destroyed their
reputation. In 1817, Byron replied to the Italian poet Ippolito Pindemonte's enquiry about the Della Cruscans in a
very direct way: 'they [the Della Cruscans] were 'all gone dead',- & damned by a satire more than thirty years ago
- that the name of their extinguisher was Gifford - that they were but a sad set of scribes after all' (L&J, V, 23334). Later, in 'Some Observations' (1820), he commented that 'the Della Cruscans- from Merry to Jerningham- [.]
were annihilated- (if Nothing can be said to be annihilated) by Gifford- the last of the wholesome English Satirists'
(Complete Prose, 105). Despite Byron's representation of the Della Cruscans and their poetry as nothingness, he
was surely influenced by their stylistic innovations and their original Anglo-Italian perspective. Thus, while the
Della Cruscan influence on British Romanticism is still largely unacknowledged, their poetry contributed to the
forging of the Mediterranean poetics, the improvisatory style, the satirical-erotic vein and the politically liberal
intent that were to prevail in British poetry during the first decades of the nineteenth century.
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Works cited:

British Satire 1785-1840, ed. John Strachan, 7 vols. (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003); vol. 4, Gifford
and the Della Cruscans.

Lastri Marco, Novelle Letterarie (Firenze: Le Lettere, 1785).

Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann, 7 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980).
__________, The Complete Miscellaneous Prose, ed. by Andrew Nicholson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).

Medwin's Conversations of Lord Byron, ed. Ernest J. Lovell (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966).

Piozzi Hester Lynch, Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey Through France, Italy and
Germany, 2 vols (London, 1789).

The Florence Miscellany (Florence: G. Cam, 1785).Gamer Michael, ' "Bell's Poetics": The Baviad, the Della
Cruscans, and the Book of The World', in The Satiric Eye: Forms of Satire in the Romantic Period, ed. Steven
E. Jones (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), 31-54.

Hardgreaves-Mawdsley, W. N, The English Della Cruscans and Their Time 1783-1828 (The Hague: Martinus
Nijhoff, 1967).

Labbe Jacqueline, 'The Anthologised Romance of Della Crusca and Anna Matilda', Romanticism on the Net 18
(May 2000).

McGann Jerome J., ' "My Brain is Feminine": Byron and the Poetry of Deception', in Byron: Augustan and
Romantic, ed. Andrew Rutherford (London: MacMillan Press, 1990), 27-50.

McGann Jerome J., 'The Literary World of the English Della Cruscans', in Fins de Siècle: English Poetry in
1590, 1690, 1790, 1890, 1990, ed. by Elaine Scarry (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995),
pp. 95-122.

Moloney Brian , 'The Della Cruscan Poets, the Florence Miscellany, and the Leopoldine Reforms', Modern
Langauge Review, 60 (1965), 18-57.

Pascoe Judith, Romantic Theatricality (London: Cornell University Press, 1997).
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