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Wall Street Journal

‘Frieze Frame' Review: The Case of the Parthenon Marbles

The debate surrounding the rightful place of the Parthenon Marbles, which were removed from the Acropolis, the site of the ancient complex of temples that overlooks Athens, by agents of Lord Elgin and delivered to London in the first years of the 19th century, is an old one—so old that its terms were framed by the poets Byron and Keats in the 1810s, soon after the Marbles' arrival in England. Keats's 1817 visit to the British Museum, where the Marbles had been recently installed, inspired his rapturous sonnet 'On Seeing the Elgin Marbles' ('My spirit is too weak—Mortality / Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep'). His companion at the museum, the history painter and diarist Benjamin Haydon, encouraged the British government to purchase from Elgin the portions of the Parthenon frieze that he had acquired, and it is not unreasonable to suppose Keats agreed. He returned to examine them 'again and again,' his friend Joseph Severn remembered, 'and would sit for an hour or more at a time beside them rapt in revery.' Keats's reflections on mortality were not merely for effect—his death, of tuberculosis, came four years later.