"While the Della Cruscan school enjoyed but brief reign, it had the effect of popularizing the highly literary romantic modes previously associated largely with university poets." Further, "While the Della Cruscans did not invent the newspaper conversation in verse, they exerted a potent influence over contributors to British and American periodicals that extended for decades." Silvia Bordoni writes, of charges that the poetry was artificial and overly-elaborate, "[t]he 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 Accademia della Crusca as exemplary of the purity and variety of the Italian language, against the spreading of foreign terminologies and dialects." Finally, the school may not have been as inconsequential as was formerly thought: "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." Texts The Arno Miscellany (privately printed, 1784). Contributors: Robert Merry, Bertie Greatheed, Hester Thrale Piozzi The Florence Miscellany (Florence, G. Cam, 1785). Contributors: William Parsons (editor), Robert Merry, Hester Thrale Piozzi, Bertie Greatheed, Ippolito Pindemonte, Lorenzo Pignotti, Angelo d'Elci, Giuseppe Parini, Marco Lastri, Gabriel Mario Piozzi. The Poetry of the World (John Bell, ed., 1788). The fourth edition was retitled The British Album (2 Vols., 1790) Contributors: Robert Merry, Hannah Cowley Etexts "Anna Matilda"[Hannah Cowley], "To Della Crusca"; "To Della Crusca. The Pen"; "Invocation to Horror"; "To Indifference" "Della Crusca" [Robert Merry], seventeen poems Bertie Greatheed, "A Dream"; "Ode to Apathy"; "Ode to Duel" "Laura Maria" [Mary Robinson], "Ainsi va le Monde, A Poem inscribed to Robert Merry"; "Ode to Della Crusca"; twenty-two poems William Parsons, seven poems Endnotes Resources Bordoni, Silvia. "Lord Byron and the Della Cruscans: The Della Cruscans' Anglo-Italian Poetics." The Centre for Study of Byron and Romanticism, 2006 [accessed April 13, 2007]. Drabble, Margaret, ed. "Della Cruscans"; "Gifford, William.The Oxford Companion to English Literature. OUP, 1985. 265-266; 390-391. Hargreaves-Mawdsley, W.N. The English Della Cruscans and Their Time, 1783-1828. International Archives of the History of Ideas #22. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1967. Labbe, Jacqueline M. "Anthologised Romance of Della Crusca and Anna Matilda." Romanticism On the Net 18 (May 2000) [accessed April 13, 2007]. Longaker, John Mark. The Della Cruscans