Nervous Reactions: Victorian Recollections of Romanticism

5. Early Romantic Theorists and The Fate of Transgressive Eloquence: John Stuart Mill’s Response to Byron

123 5 Early Romantic Theorists and The Fate of Transgressive Eloquence: John Stuart Mill’s Response to Byron Timothy J. Wandling “Eloquence is heard, poetry is overheard.” —John Stuart Mill, “Thoughts on Poetry and its Varieties” For I will teach, if possible, the stones To rise against the tyrants. Never let it Be said that we still truckle unto thrones;— But ye—our children’s children! think how we Showed what things were before the world was free! —Byron, Don Juan This chapter examines the question of what became of Byronic poetics and the cultural anxieties that shape the negative reaction to his audiencedriven mode of poetry. In the passages quoted here, John Stuart Mill and Byron put forward contrasting models of poetic practice. Mill’s wellknown description of poetry as that which is “overheard” reflects these post-Romantic anxieties about readers that shape both the negative reception of Byron’s poetry and the ideas about audiences that come to inhabit the institutions of literary criticism. Against the grain of the expressive poetics developed and articulated by his contemporaries, Byron practices a mode of poetry that throughout his career seeks to engage his audience with issues both political and personal, often showing how the two could not be separated.1 His poetics are not published in traditional accounts of Romantic literary theory; however, as is the case with Keats, Byron’s letters , journals, and, in particular, his poetry itself, can allow us to discern a poetics of transgressive eloquence that is quite unlike that of any of his now canonical contemporaries.2 To explore the fate of this poetics, we must look to the literary and social milieu of the late 1820s and into the next decades in order to see how Byron’s transgressive eloquence is rejected and the hostility to mass audiences articulated by Wordsworth and Coleridge became institutionalized as part of literary study. One might expect a rethinking of Byronic poetics to be a crucial part of the critical project of the last two decades, but this has not necessarily been the case. Beginning in the early 1980s with the work of Jerome McGann , Marjorie Levinson, and others, scholars began a crucial rethinking about what constitutes Romanticism. The result has been an emerging criticism that refuses to take Romanticism on its own terms and that seeks to reveal the ideologies that underlie canonical Romantic works. This inquiry has necessarily focused on the five poets, Wordsworth above all, whose work has traditionally been seen as expressive or visionary. At the same time, scholarly work has flourished on noncanonical writers, particularly the many important women writers of the period. Byron, however, remains uneasily camped in either of these groups, neither canonical nor marginalized. On the one hand, he is, after all, one of the six major male poets of traditional Romantic period courses; but on the other hand, his mode of poetry was hardly influential at all in terms of the development of English literary history. Save Auden, few traditionally anthologized poets have ever modeled their practice on Byron’s. One might say that while Byron has remained a canonical figure, always represented as important to understanding the feelings of the Romantic era, his poetry, and especially his poetics, have remained less than central to the study of Romanticism. To explore how Byronic practice came to be seen as less than central to Romanticism requires an examination of the fate of Byron’s poetics of transgressive eloquence in terms of the cultural values developed and articulated by the Victorian men of letters. These men grew up reading the Romantics, and their work in the developing field of literary studies led to an eventually dominant poetics, a poetics quietist in its politics and hostile to mass reading audiences in its ethos. When Mill uttered his famous proclamation opposing poetry to eloquence, he was self-consciously arguing against Byronic practice, as his contemporary readers were well 124 Timothy J. Wandling aware.3 His opinions about Byron did not see print until 1873, when his Autobiography was published. However, the records of the debates centered on Byron, Wordsworth, and the relationship of poetry to audience are available to us and will provide a glimpse into the cultural anxieties that underlie the literary values shaped during the period. Despite his own political radicalism, Mill’s poetics align with those of the dominant strain of reactionary nineteenth-century theorists, who sought to...