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 otherworldly 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 in-spired mythmaking to present an unforgettable portrait of two of the greatest poets, and extraordinary characters, of the Romantic age. No more vivid account of the lives of the poets exists in English.