Early in Canto IV of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, written when Byron’s wanderings had led him at last to a more settled residence in Italy, he balances all that he has acquired in exile with a new wistfulness about England:

The country of his birth proves difficult to get rid of, as a place ‘where men are proud to be’ and ‘Not without cause’. Nonchalance (and sexual mischief) mingle with pathos, as Byron vaunts his skill with ‘other tongues’ and his intrepidness in seeking ‘out a home by a remoter sea’, while confessing affection for the ‘inviolate island of the sage and free’. Though in Don Juan he declares ‘I am half a scot by birth, and bred / A whole one’, he was born in London and lived in England for much of his life; all of the years relating to his time as a literary celebrity were spent south of the border.² It is fitting that he should turn his thoughts to England at the start of Canto IV, given that Childe Harold took shape during his youthful travels abroad and its subsequent release on his return made his name in his homeland. The lines above have his English audience very much in view – those readers who had adored him upon the publication of Cantos I–II, but had, he felt, turned their back after the storm of gossip around the breakup of his marriage. That conditional ‘Perhaps’ (st. 9) carries with it all the controversy of his last months in England and the mixed feelings with which he continued to regard the place of his birth.

Byron’s performativity is clear to see. The personal connection long felt by his readers to the affective register of intimacy and heartbreak of Childe Harold is resurrected in order to court the English public, and gives the lie to his claim about ‘seek[ing] no sympathies’. Towards the end of November 1816, Byron had written to Douglas Kinnaird from Venice: ‘If I could but manage to arrange my pecuniary concerns in England … you might consider me as posthumous – for I would never willingly dwell in that “tight little Island’’’ (BLJ, V. 136). In the passage above, though, it is his posthumous life in relation to England that is uppermost in his mind. Canto IV is obsessed with exiled men, poets perhaps especially, who are forced to find new homes and later buried in foreign soil. In this context, Byron’s thoughts turn to his own resting place, ‘ashes in a soil which is not mine’, and the possibility that his spirit might regain a place in England, if only ‘we may / Unbodied choose a sanctuary’.

‘I have no great cause to love that spot of earth’ (X. 66), the Don Juan narrator declares as the poem’s hero nears England’s ‘chalky belt’. But in the lines quoted from Childe Harold, as so often in his writing, Byron distinguishes between physical plots of land and the preservation and representation that happen through poetry. Punning on the double meaning of ‘line’ (‘I twine / My hopes of being remembered in my line / With my land’s language’), he reminds us that lines of verse have a lineage too. The ‘twin[ing]’ of ‘mine’ with ‘my line’ demonstrates not only how rhyme itself resurrects, but also how much store he put in the possibility of living on through verse. To have ‘mine’ and ‘my line’ roll easily into ‘my land’s language’ is to anticipate being preserved through English poetry specifically.³ E. H. Coleridge wondered whether there was a ‘tacit reference to burial in … [Westminster] Abbey’, an idea that puts Byron at least physically among the English poets.⁴ For Jerome McGann, the clearest inference is the Temple of Fame, which Coleridge also acknowledges.⁵ Pope’s poem of that name adumbrates the forms of misrepresentation, neglect or obscurity that can befall dead poets, expressing an anxiety about the precarity and contingency of poetic afterlives that also haunts the Childe Harold passage. Byron’s wish that his poetic line should fall in with ‘my land’s language’, though, suggests that any temple awaiting him is bound up with his being an English poet.

Byron’s mixed feelings about the capriciousness of fame and the prospect of a literary afterlife play out across his writing. He was fascinated by the question of what survives the passage of time and the forms of representation involved – burial sites and tombs, memorials and statues, the inscription of print and the more intangible kinds of existence shaped by generations of art and culture. These concerns are expressed poignantly in Childe Harold, but in Don Juan refashioned with a greater degree of scepticism. While mocking many of his contemporaries for clinging to the belief that the ‘complaint of present days’ was ‘the certain path to future praise’ (‘Dedication’, 8), in his own case Byron combined suspicion of the ‘logic of posthumous fame’ with cautious investment in the idea, as perhaps the ‘only antidote to the tribulations of contemporary fame’.⁶ Often the idea of posthumous existence is framed as consolation:

Poetry preserved on paper is conceived as evanescent and delicate (‘like dew’), yet enduringly strong, so that ‘a small drop of ink’ can ‘form a lasting link / Of ages’. But this thought itself is short-lived. Elsewhere in the canto, the narrator laments that the posthumous poetic life may be subject to the whims of cultural taste, or the moral demands of ‘The public mind’ (III. 95); or contingent upon the arbitrary discovery of ‘Some dull MS’, the ‘digging’ up of a ‘name’, or the passing down of mere ‘entertaining facts’ (III. 89–92) of biography. Critical interpretations, meanwhile, transform and (mis)remember. Byron recalls in the ‘Dedication’ the neutering of Milton’s former reputation for political radicalism by early eighteenth-century critics, such that now ‘the word “Miltonic” mean[s] “sublime’’’ (st. 10). To ‘pass each day where Dante’s bones are laid’ (IV. 104) is to be reminded that the ‘time must come’ when ‘the bard’s tomb’ but also ‘the poet’s volume, / Will sink where lie the songs and wars of earth, / Before Pelides’ death, or Homer’s birth’ (IV. 104).

‘Yet’, Byron counters, ‘there will still be bards’: those who are compelled by ‘fame’ – the fumes of which are ‘frankincense to human thought’ – and by ‘unquiet feelings, which first woke / Song in the world’ (IV. 106). Poets driven by these things will preserve in their writing a genealogy of verse lines passed down over generations, even if such representation can only ever be conditional and partial. ‘What is Poetry? – The feeling of a Former world and Future’ (BLJ, VIII. 37), Byron writes in his Ravenna Journal in January 1821. Poetry in his view carries a sense of its own history as well as being made by history: it preserves a feel for the lineage of its internal life, carrying the legacies of past writing into present and future lines.

The hope about living on through English poetry articulated at the beginning of Childe Harold IV may seem the more remarkable given that during this period Byron was increasingly ‘saturating himself and his work in the Italian culture surrounding him’.⁷ But those years in exile created fresh impetus for him to think about his work in the context of English letters, even as he wrote against the prospect of returning home and scorned England’s contemporary culture and politics. The year after Canto IV was published, he wrote to Murray from Bologna, having stopped off briefly after leaving Venice for Ravenna where he planned to settle with Teresa Guiccioli. A visit to a local cemetery provoked this vehement display of desire for a Venetian rather than an English grave:

This is typically Byronic in its deployment of humour and hyperbole to deflect hurt feelings; we sense that the rejection of England is spurred by England’s prior rejection, as the letter goes on to suggest. Perhaps more telling, though, is the way Byron looks to English literature as a means of making his way imaginatively through life abroad. There is the allusion to Sheridan’s The Rivals (‘pickling and bringing me home to Clod or Blunderbuss Hall’), which brings to all the graveness a degree of hilarity, but also recalls Byron’s association with the London stage and Whig society in England. There is the ‘original’ figure of the ‘Custode’, who calls to mind the gravediggers’ scene in Hamlet; and the sexton’s reminiscences over the skull of one of his brother monks (‘the merriest – cleverest fellow’ in life, who ‘danced’, ‘joked’ and ‘laughed’, and ‘wherever he went brought joy’ (BLJ, VI. 149)), which serve to evoke Yorick and his infinite jest. The exchange with the ‘Custode’ is a version of the dialogue between the speaker and sexton in ‘Churchill’s Grave’ (1816), which Byron wrote after visiting the satirist’s burial place at Dover on the eve of what would be his last departure from England. Commemorating the poet whom he took as an early generic model (and whose lines ‘Be England what She will, / With all her faults She is my Country still’ he refashioned for Beppo), the poem’s meditative style, ‘deep thought’ and use of ‘homely phrase’ also imitate the Wordsworth of The Excursion and certain portions of Lyrical Ballads. It is a characteristic mixing of satire and sentiment fostered by English traditions.⁸

The playfully petulant ‘I would not even feed your worms – if I could help it’ leads Byron to remember ‘Mowbray the banished Duke of Norfolk – who died at Venice’ in Richard II, and who, in Shakespeare’s words,

Mowbray serves as a surrogate for Byron’s own situation, just as English poetry gives him the words to represent his Englishness abroad and fashion an idea of his death in exile. In the next moment he thinks of his own verse’s arrival in England, reminding Murray that ‘I had returned to you your late – and Mr. Hobhouse’s sheets of Juan’ (BLJ, VI. 149). English or English-based writers past and present and thoughts of a future burial in Italy combine to prompt the recollection of Don Juan travelling home, in a manner that suggests that Byron considered his poetry the best – and, given his complicated family life, perhaps the only – means of his preservation in England.

It was Keats who cheered himself with the prospect that ‘I shall be among the English Poets after my death’, following scathing reviews of Endymion.⁹ As the most famous and bestselling English writer of his day, Byron had little need to imagine future acclaim to make up for a lack of popular and critical success. In that respect, at least, he was only ‘among’ the English poets in the sense of being distinguished from them.¹⁰ He did, however, ‘know the precise worth of popular applause’ (BLJ, VI. 106) and frequently found it wanting. Given the way he felt he had been treated in the years after the end of his marriage, and equipped with a better understanding than most of the nature of fame, he had perhaps good reason to wonder about his place in the pantheon of English poets. He was deeply preoccupied, as Keats was, with the question of where he sat in relation to past and present writers, and knew that short-lived popularity wasn’t necessarily the best indicator of long-term success.

For Byron, poetic achievement was always relative. Writing meant dwelling in an echo chamber of other voices whose prior claims on language both enriched and restricted what he had to say (restriction being productive of its own creative possibilities). He felt deeply that literary traditions mattered and thought about poetic form as something embedded in historical moments and places. Less interested in – and sometimes actively hostile to – the notions of ‘originality’ and ‘natural genius’ that excited many of his contemporaries, he wrote passionately and unfashionably about the value of imitation and of maintaining a thorough acquaintance with past masters.

That interest was worldly and directed especially towards Europe. His poetry brims with voices from across the Continent: Horace, Juvenal, Virgil and Dante; Pulci, Ariosto, Rabelais, Goethe and de Staël. The legacy of this cosmopolitan reading has been well served in scholarship of recent years.¹¹ Several of our contributors (Gregory Dowling, Diego Saglia, Jane Stabler, Susan J. Wolfson and others) have detailed elsewhere various ways in which Byron’s writing is informed by an international inheritance and speaks back to it. The contention of our volume is that his poetry engages as richly and experimentally with English influences and has licensed experimentation in multiple strands of post-Romantic English verse. We take Byron’s solicitude for poetic conventions and his core belief in the need for poets to shape themselves in response to each other as our motivation for reading his work alongside and through that of other English poets, and within the English poetic tradition more broadly. Our collection presents him as a poet’s poet, a writer whose verse has served as both echo of and prompt for a host of other voices. Our aim is to explore the many ways Byron might be thought to be – perhaps more than most – ‘among’ the poets: alluding and alluded to; collaborative; competitive; parodied; worked and reworked in imitations, critiques, tributes and travesties. We consider the contours of individual relationships as well as exploring broader questions about the nature of intertextuality and the historicity of form.

Byron references, alludes to, and takes from Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton and Pope, and is influenced by contemporaries or near-contemporaries. For all the ridicule in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers and Don Juan of the ‘Lakers’, his writing would look very different without the example of Wordsworth in particular, as many (including Wordsworth) observed at the time.¹² Wordsworth’s poetry in turn – in company with that of Shelley, Clare, Hemans and others – adapted to or formed itself against the challenge he presented. What we now call Romanticism is shaped in large part by the rivalries of these poets: what they believed poetry should be for, and how they attempted to define the poetic tastes of their age. For nineteenth-, twentieth- and twenty-first-century poets, meanwhile, Byron offered lyrical, narrative and satiric modes: he was reworked both by those who admired him as a Romantic lyricist and by those who felt ambivalent about the Romantic tradition they had inherited and found uses for his scepticism and levity. In his ‘Memorial Verses, April 1850’, composed after the death of Wordsworth, Matthew Arnold does not spare Byron (‘He taught us little’), yet adopts Childe Harold-like intensity and imagery to acknowledge his lyrical power: ‘our soul / Had felt him like the thunder’s roll’. En route to Iceland, Auden pays chatty, gossipy tribute to Don Juan in his ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ (1937): ‘I read it on the boat to Reykjavik / Except when eating or asleep or sick’.

Poems ‘are more like each other than they are like reality’, John Hollander suggests.¹³ For Byron poems had to be like reality – like life – but he also saw them as like other poems, and made up of them. From Fugitive Pieces (1806) and English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809) through to Don Juan (1819–24) and his last lyrics, he displayed a keen sense of the mechanics of allusion and how remembrances of other texts could be deployed to various effect. Whom he chose to reference and whom he rejected as not worth reading could be a political battleground. Allusion might signal unmixed admiration or creative enmity; predecessors could be framed as compelling models of what not to do as well as sources of positive inspiration.

Sometimes he referenced systematically in order to reinforce a philosophical argument or draw attention to a parallel plot, as in his handling of Paradise Lost in Cain (1821); sometimes he used facetious notes to point up the interpretative difficulties surrounding a particular classical tag, in the manner of Pope in The Dunciad; sometimes, as in his letters, he alluded promiscuously and miscellaneously for the pleasure of displaying wide reading or historical knowledge and revelling in textual incongruity. The talk of ‘Jack Keats or Ketch or whatever his names are’ in a letter of 1820, for instance, is fitting if we remember that he viewed Keats’s writing as ‘a sort of mental masturbation – he is always f–gg–g his Imagination’ (BLJ, VII. 217, 225). Ketch – an executioner for Charles II infamous for his botched jobs – was common parlance for the hangman; but the name also, as Byron enjoyed informing Murray, referred to ‘an Italian fiddler’ who accidentally hanged himself during his own private performance of ‘scarfing’ (BLJ, VII. 217).

The voices that jostle into Byron’s writing are often extra-literary, recalling news bulletins, social gossip, historical anecdote and dimly remembered stories. ‘Let no man grumble when his friends fall off’, the Don Juan narrator counsels in Canto XIV. ‘When your affairs come round, one way or t’other, / Go to the coffee-house, and take another’ (XIV. 48). The brusque eighteenth-century air of this sentiment is confirmed by a note: ‘In Swift’s or Horace Walpole’s letters I think it is mentioned, that somebody regretting the loss of a friend, was answered by a universal Pylades: “When I lose one, I go to the St. James’s Coffee-house, and take another’’’.¹⁴ Since, as McGann points out, the anecdote in question is in fact ‘in neither Swift nor Walpole’, the playful vagueness here (‘I think’; ‘somebody’; ‘a universal Pylades’) might be real forgetting or part of the act, of a piece with the broader social atmosphere of exaggeration and performance that underpins the English Cantos.

The chapters in this book are preoccupied both with Byronic allusion and the question of poetic influence more broadly, as it relates to Byron’s reworking of his predecessors and to the way Byronic wording, forms and ideas surface and resurface in the work of later writers. As Andrew Elfenbein has pointed out in the context of Victorian legacies, the latter half of this question is apt to be especially complex because of the sheer range of Byrons and Byronisms available: would-be successors encountered his authorship refracted through biographies, anecdotes, portraits and commercial objects as well as the verse.¹⁵ The same is true of the Byronic encounters of twentieth- and twenty-first-century poets. Gregory Leadbetter’s discussion in this volume of Lawrence Durrell’s ‘Byron’ (1944), with its casting of a historically transposed Byronic first-person speaker (‘this shadow, / My own invention of myself’), illustrates well the special possibilities and problems of coming after. We suggest, however, that the complexity of the ways Byron himself registered, thought about and used the influences operating on his poetry remains underestimated. As the chapters in the first half of the book demonstrate, his writing evinces a deep and plural understanding of the ambiguities as well as the assurances that invoking other voices could bring.

Allusion, as Christopher Ricks has shown, is a particular sub-category of intertextual work, in that it involves a source’s being used not only in the process of a poem’s construction but as part of its intended meaning. Ricks posits that it must be actively ‘called into play’ and recognisable by the reader as such, rather than being merely detectable as background noise or discarded scaffolding.¹⁶ Several of the chapters here deal with this order of influence. Bernard Beatty’s discussion of Byron and Shakespeare investigates Byron’s ability to allude ‘as a form of thinking’, an active inhabiting and transformation of a source in order to create a new imaginative or psychological situation. Fred Parker’s chapter on Byron’s Pope looks at the complex play between self-revelation and self-concealment enabled by a version of imitation that works like identification, allusion as ‘playing at being’ an admired predecessor.

Other chapters consider – and seek to theorise – kinds of intertextual connection that are harder to pin down as a matter of intention: commonalities that Geoffrey Hill has observed as arising from ‘the mass of circumstance, the pressures of contingency’ in language, or which Harold Bloom calls ‘the hidden roads that go from poem to poem’.¹⁷ Jane Stabler’s interest in commonplace conversational words in the poetry of Byron and Robert Browning makes room for unconscious invocations or chance convergences, suggesting that Browning’s habit of deploying ‘certain phrases in the same way as Byron’ helps us to recognise their ‘shared poetic’. (Here we might think of Bakhtin’s idea of ‘the social atmosphere of the word’, the contingent mass of associations and accents through which a word passes on its way to conceptualising its object, which creates a ‘living and unrepeatable play of colours and light on the facets of the image that it constructs’.)¹⁸ Differently again, Susan J. Wolfson and Jonathan Sachs’s chapters – on Byron’s literary relationships to Barbauld and Keats respectively – approach intertextuality as a historically specific cultural field, a climate of texts, conventions and expectations within which individual poets converge on ideas and forms. Tom Lockwood’s chapter on Byron and Rochester moves beyond thinking about what Byron might have been able to do with Rochester to posit a triangular model of influence, arguing that the two poets have often been used to illuminate one another or read against each other by third parties.

Central to the focus on influence in this book is the notion that texts and forms do not stand still. They move and change as they are inherited and refashioned (in history and by it); they shapeshift internally; and they are susceptible to the pressure of anticipated and real readerly interpretations. Here we take as our starting point the historicised formalism of Wolfson, Stabler and others. While poetic forms call for a ‘specific kind of critical attention’ and are not merely ‘conscriptable’ for the purposes of other analytical frameworks, they are nonetheless to be understood as neither fixed nor transcendent but conditioned by the shifting ‘historical matrices of literary composition’.¹⁹ Byron admired poets whom he believed had understood and mastered the technical requirements of a particular form or genre. ‘The poet who executes best – is the highest – whatever his department’, he wrote in 1821 with Pope in mind. ‘Cast your eye over his productions … – Pastoral – Passion – Mock-heroic – Translation – Satire – Ethics – all excellent – and often perfect’.²⁰ But in his own practice he worked to develop and complicate his handling of forms rather than trying to ‘execute’ or ‘perfect’ them as static vessels. Prone as he was to playing down the quotidian labour of being a writer and to deriding the professionalisation of what he thought of as an art, his sophisticated understanding of prosody and the time he devoted to writing about verse indicate the depth of his interest in the experimental possibilities of difficult stanza forms.²¹ As Anna Camilleri points out in her chapter on Byron and English prosody, the Spenserian stanza in the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812) takes on a different incarnation in Cantos III (1816) and IV (1818), its boundaries loosening to accommodate longer arguments and narrative lines. Ross Wilson shows likewise that both Byron and Shelley experimented with handling the ottava rima stanza in unexpected ways, refusing the closure that its couplet seems to invite and allowing stanzas to turn in on themselves.

The attention that many chapters here pay to poetics is bound up in the second half of the book with the question of post-Romantic influence. We are interested not just in Byron’s verse-writing and abilities as a technician, but also in the formal experimentation his work suggested or licensed in later writers and the sometimes rebarbative thinking about form sparked by his example. Richard Cronin’s discussion of Swinburne’s treatment of Byron shows Swinburne anxious to ‘fend off Byron’ on the grounds of metrical difference, setting his own commitment to regularity against what he thought of as Byron’s pervasive ineptitude with syllables and stresses. Seamus Perry’s chapter on Auden and Byron suggests that Auden drew on what he saw as Byron’s ‘lack of reverence for words’ in the awkward rhymes of Don Juan, using them as a means of bolstering his own unserious poetic self-image.

For Gregory Dowling, the anthology A Modern Don Juan (2014) shows that the shape of Byron’s epic continues to foster creative ways with digression and formal determinism – and, in the case of A. E. Stallings, enables the writing of poetry which is ‘not only lyrical’ but contains room for social commentary and satire too. A major ambition of our volume is to reveal the variousness and extent of Byron’s poetic afterlife, which – in its twentieth- and twenty-first-century aspects especially – remains a relatively understudied field of enquiry, his writing being more typically set against that of his Romantic contemporaries or identified with the traditions it draws on. Recent important studies on the legacy of Romantic poetry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have tended to prioritise Wordsworthian, Coleridgean or Keatsian lines of influence; Byron is often seen as an anomaly or a counterpoint in what is perceived as the dominant Romantic inheritance.²² Our chapters on his posthumous influence extend from Landon to Stallings, covering poets who allude variously to Romantic and anti-Romantic strands of his work. They reveal, as Leadbetter argues in his chapter, the breadth of Byron’s uses for later poets, as a writer given to ‘offering alternatives to positions that his own work adopts’.

Byron Among the English Poets is divided into three chronological sections, each covering Byron’s relationship to a range of individual writers or groups of writers. Part I, ‘Inheritances’, deals with several of his major poetic influences in the English tradition. Beatty’s discussion of Byron’s pervasive Shakespearianism (despite Byron’s own assertions to the contrary) is followed by Jonathon Shears’s chapter on Byron and Milton, which considers the intellectual influences operating on the writing of Cain and Byron’s modification of Milton’s view of the relationship between reason, emotion and belief. Lockwood’s chapter on Byron and Rochester looks critically at the genealogy of the tradition of comparing the two poets, as well as the substance of the comparison itself; while Parker’s chapter on Byron and Pope – the relationship which, above all others, Byron was keenest to claim – points to similarities between the two poets’ inconstant presences in their satires and imitations, their tricks of offering and disclaiming performative versions of selfhood. Clara Tuite’s chapter on the Della Cruscans and female poets of sensibility reads Byron’s early and late lyrics for signs of the endurance of an (often-disclaimed) sentimental poetics of the occasional, radical and sensational. Focussing on the same period, Clare Bucknell’s discussion of Byron’s reading in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century satire fleshes out an allusive tradition of anti-reviewing critique, based around a central metaphor of political or judicial authoritarianism. Camilleri’s chapter on the development of Byron’s prosodic facility, lastly, closes out the section by studying the genealogy of his couplet inheritance and the limits of his fidelity to English neoclassical models.

Part II, ‘Contemporaries’, looks at the conversations and arguments Byron engaged in with the English poets of his own period. Madeleine Callaghan’s close reading of his longstanding mockery of Wordsworth draws out the ‘doubly serious’ purpose of his laughter, an attempt to dominate contemporary procedures of taste formation; while Wolfson’s chapter on versions of anti-war critique in Barbauld’s Eighteen Hundred and Eleven and the contemporaneous Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage I–II reads the two poems both against one another and in the context of their startlingly different critical receptions. Wilson’s chapter on Byron and Shelley focusses on similarities and contrasts between the two poets’ handling of the ottava rima stanza, teasing out the involuted movements, disturbed equivalences and undermined distinctions that the form may be brought to support. Sachs’s discussion of the relationship between Byron and Keats starts, like Callaghan’s chapter, from a premise of difference and mutual dislike, but builds to consider the distinctively irregular ‘temporal signatures’ of the two poets’ verse and their shared preoccupation with contemporary notions of time’s movement. Saglia’s study of Byron’s influence on Romantic verse narratives discovers moments of dissent and critique in Moore, Hemans and Landon’s reformulations of his structural innovations in the Eastern Tales; and, lastly, Simon Kövesi’s chapter on class consciousness in Clare’s reading of Byron interrogates the perception of his poetry among labouring-class writers as a source of both licence and inhibition.

Part III, ‘Afterlives’, looks ahead to the presence of Byronic forms, motifs, manners and characters in post-Romantic poetry. Sarah Wootton’s chapter on Landon and early Victorian women poets opens the section, teasing out the equivocatory nature of Landon’s ekphrastic responses to Byron’s portraits and her self-reflexive engagement with perceived Byronic failings. Stabler’s chapter on Browning and Byron notices ways in which both poets sketch out a nebulousness (‘a something’) around the edges of ordinary social interactions, similarly balancing ‘tangibility and abstraction’, literalism and obscurity. Matthew Ward discusses the emotive ways Arnold is drawn to Byron’s Promethean ‘force and fire’ and Romantic ‘pleasing melancholy’, even as he reaches for Wordsworthian temperate sympathies and moral purpose. Cronin’s piece on Swinburne’s metrical strictures contests Swinburne’s critical verdicts and draws out the curious ways in which Byronic phrasing and imagery creep into even his most categorical attempts to prefer Wordsworth. In the twentieth century, Perry takes a fresh look at an established relationship, Auden’s Byron, and considers what Auden had to do to Byron in order to turn him into the anti-Wordsworth and anti-Shelley he sought in a poetic model. Leadbetter, on Byronic influence in poetry of the second half of the century, focusses particularly on Don Juan as the work which offered most to a ‘sceptical’ age, while also discussing the usefulness of Byron’s example for neo-romantic and rationalist strands of literary thought. Dowling’s chapter, lastly, brings the volume up to the present day with a reading of contemporary Byronic verse narratives, which show the mobile, improvisatory, digressive qualities of the ottava rima stanza (and related variants) to be well suited to the pace and strangeness of modern life.

‘The best of Prophets of the future is the Past’ (BLJ, VIII. 37), Byron wrote. It is to be hoped that this volume presents an understanding of Byron’s poetry that can be taken forward into the future.