Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2plfb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-26T16:36:15.845Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 19 - Byronic Inflections in British Poetry since 1945

from Part III - Afterlives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 July 2021

Clare Bucknell
Affiliation:
All Souls College, Oxford
Matthew Ward
Affiliation:
University of Birmingham
Get access

Summary

In a marginal note of 1807, Coleridge writes: ‘who shall dare say of yon river, such & such a wave came from such a fountain? What Scholar […] shall say—Such a conviction, such a moral feeling, I received from St John/ such & such from Seneca, or Epictetus?’1 An essay of the kind presented here – which pursues how elements of form and style in Byron’s verse manifest in British poetry since the 1940s – contends with a similar issue. Cultural currents flow mixedly in poetry, and to discover a ‘Byronic’ characteristic in modern verse may not be to prove direct readerly influence. That is why, in part, I refer to inflection – which preserves a certain agnosticism – as the more accommodating term for the Byronic traces I have recognised: those observable variations in the practice of poetry that, however obliquely, respond in some way to Byron’s own. That response may involve a deliberate engagement with Byron’s work (and often does), but it may also be more implicit: a response to the less obvious but nonetheless palpable effects that Byron’s poetry has had on the possibilities of language and poetry, as they have been perceived since the mid-twentieth century. These inflections reveal the latent presence of Byron’s poetics the way iron filings reveal the presence of a magnetic field.

Type
Chapter
Information
Byron Among the English Poets
Literary Tradition and Poetic Legacy
, pp. 317 - 331
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×