Byron’s career as a poet was bound up with the periodical reviews from the start. Beginning with the publication of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers in 1809 – and, even earlier, with the hostile review of Hours of Idleness in the Edinburgh Review that prompted it – Byron’s identity as a poet was distinctly public – and public in a new way. In one sense, this goes without saying: Byron was famous, and famously so. In another sense, however, the public nature of Byron’s career – and its close proximity to the developing culture of reviewing – has been difficult to see. Despite the long-standing critical interest in early nineteenth-century reviewing, we have only recently begun to appreciate the extent to which Romantic literature and periodical reviewing were reciprocal activities. Considering Byron’s career in the context of the literary reviews and the emerging mass media discloses the sense in which the periodical culture of reviewing was transforming literary production in the Romantic period. Byron’s poetry makes it dramatically clear that the literary world into which the new poet sought to introduce himself in the early nineteenth century was one that was in the process of being remade by the interconnection of poetry and the reviews.