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the illusion of social progress

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4 - Byron and the “Wrong Revolutionary Poetical System”
Jerome McGann, University of Virginia
Book:

Byron and the Poetics of Adversity

Published online:

27 November 2022

Print publication:

15 December 2022, pp 103-118
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Summary

Keying off Thomas Moore’s assessment of Romanticism as “mannerist” and Byron’s exploration of his own “medley style” in Manfred, Byron once again used Pope’s performative poetics to take a critical measure of the dominant verse practices of his period. Reflecting on the extreme subjectivity of Romantic styles of expression, Byron argued that the highly subjective Romantic revolutions of the word called all poetic and moral “norms” to a self-critical accounting. Cantos III and IV of Childe Harold took the cases of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and the French Revolution as a warning to the poets and poetry of Romantic Enlightenment. Henceforth, Byron suggested, poetic freedom would entail zero degree writing: verse would be located at the imperiled “inner standing point” – he called it “Liberty” – of a naked and uncertain address