Byron and the Isles of Imagination: A Romantic Chart (review)

While the first generation of Romantic poets had little sustained interest in the motif of the island as a conceptual, imaginative or physical entity, the resonances were deeply and profoundly felt and experienced by Byron. This new collection of essays examines the ways in which the embodied and imagined island spaces of Byron's verse correspond to his troubled questions about interiority, intersubjectivity and public responsibility. Time and again the contributors to this volume immerse themselves–and rightly so–in the central grouping of Byron's island locations: Torquil and Neuha's Toobonai in The Island (a poem that deserves a book), Lambro's Ionian isle, the operatic setting of tower and cave in The Corsair, the complex of islands that politically and aesthetically accrue around Napoleon, and Byron self-enisled in 'On this day I complete my thirty-sixth year'. It is worth thinking through whether this succession of Byronic islands represents a larger archipelago of meaning in which, for example, Juan and Haidée come to be read as presentiments of Torquil and Neuha, or whether they stand alone and without correspondence. Byron's islands are amongst other things sites of desire, claustrophobia, utopia, refuge, savagery, civilization, disappointment and victory. Each of the essays included here explores the vast and intimate implications of these isles of Byron's imagination. As the book is not overlong there is space here to look at each in turn.

The introduction by Alistair Heys makes bold links between Byron's bafflement at the Lake poets' splendid intellectual isolation, the sublimation of Napoleonic failure in repeated returns to island paradises and the politics of contemporary insularity or narrowness associated with English (and Scottish) nationalism. While history is initially drawn large in Heys' 'imagistic yoking' of dungeons and paradises, his argument shades into an interesting reading of the imaginative elisions of The Island via Byron's recapitulation of Diderot, whereby the 'Old World' was 'more degraded than the New, – / Till Europe taught them better than before'.

Michael O'Neill's exploration of Matthew Arnold's debt to Byron establishes the 'deeply interiorised' processes through which the Victorian poet plays out the complex harmony that allowed him to accept discord within personal life. '"In the Sea of life enisled": Byron and Arnold' captures Arnold in medias res, following–through 'Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse', Empedocles on Etna and selected prose–a Byronic passage from ironic and selfconflicted posturing to the emergent puissant personality that harmonises with Yeats' belief in the authenticity of masks. O'Neill uses the motif of oceanic isolation to expertly enlarge on a relationship between two poets that is so often reduced to unrepresentative quotation from Arnold's notorious essay on Byron of 1881. Taking account of Arnold's reservations about Byron's capacity to feel the burden of Wordsworthian mystery, the excellence of O'Neill's essay lies in the coherence of its close reading of the dying Gladiator sequence in Canto IV of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and its ability to tell of the dialectic of content and manner therein.

In 'Inhabiting Islands: Byron and Shelley's Little Difference', Bernard Beatty unearths thought-provoking discrepancies in the etymology of the word 'island' that allow him to reconceptualise the difference between indeterminate isolation and determined insularity (as Byron becomes one of the new users of a 'most affected word', 'isolation'). Reading Byron with and against Shelley, via the differences in the nature of Julian's beach and the Maniac's isle in Julian and Maddalo, Beatty argues convincingly for progress, change and variation within Byron's islands whereby the reader is invited to become 'island insiders and to think accordingly'. The analysis of similarity within the differences between Medora's vertical and rejected tower, Haidée's fecund island, which takes its logic from her passion for Juan, and Torquil's leap of faith is superbly balanced and well observed. Beatty argues that while...