Picturing Poems: Tennyson, the Italian Pre-Raphaelites and D’Annunzio

During the first years of his artistic apprenticeship, Tennyson represented for D’Annunzio a source of poetic (and visual) influence, accompanying his trajectory from his early blend of medievalism and aestheticism to his later symbolist and modernist turn. In this respect, the presence of painting and painterly references in D’Annunzio’s poems and novels makes him an “ekphrastic” writer, who aims to create a constant dialogue between verbal and visual texts. In particular, the illustrated edition of D’Annunzio’s collection of poems Isaotta Guttadàuro (1886) shows Tennyson’s influence, and specifically the impact exerted by the illustrated edition of the Laureate’s poems, published in 1857 by Edward Moxon.