… and a rival who exacerbated his sense of creative inferiority and his anxiety about his lack of a wide readership. Their conversations at Venice in August 1818 were a source of inspiration for Shelley’s poem ‘ Julian and Maddalo,’ where Julian embodies Shelley and Maddalo, Byron. Shaped like a philosophical dialogue in a conversational or familiar style, the poem also underlines the difficulty to communicate with the world and points the …