Shadows and Magnitude. It is easy to forget that, when John Keats (1795–1821) wrote his often-anthologized sonnet “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” in 1817, the eponymous Marbles were relatively new immigrants to England. They retained a frisson of recent controversy: the source of public and parliamentary debate a year before, they had only just been unveiled to the general public in the British Museum.
