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  • Byron's Orphic Poetics and the Foundations of Literary Modernism
  • Christopher A. Strathman

Who has twisted us around like this, so thatno matter what we do, we are in the postureof someone going away? Just as, uponthe farthest hill, which shows him his whole valleyone last time, he turns, stops, lingers—,so we live here, forever taking leave.

—Rainer Maria Rilke

I

It is a commonplace perhaps most memorably formulated by Jerome McGann that many of the most influential scholars, critics, and theorists of romanticism have had trouble fitting Byron into their conceptual paradigms.1 While M. H. Abrams's omission of the poet's work from Natural Supernaturalism (1971) remains probably the best-known example,2 comprehensive readings integrating Byron into the larger drama of romantic poetry and poetics are still, with some important exceptions, remarkably hard to find.3 In my own Romantic Poetry and the Fragmentary Imperative (2006), I have tried to show how Byron might be located closer to the mainstream of modern literary tradition by considering his works from the standpoint of his experimentation with what Mikhail Bakhtin calls "novelistic discourse," a phrase I take to be a loose translation of Friedrich Schlegel's notion of "romantische Poesie."4 Nevertheless, Byron seems to be the poet—certainly the major romantic—who, as a poet, inspires in his readers the least amount of confidence.5 That is to say, if one experiences during the course of reading works by Wordsworth and Keats (or Dickinson and Whitman) the perpetual contemporaneousness of their discourse, Byron is all too often regarded as a poet of his time. To his credit, McGann has spent much of his career as a critic, theorist, and editor attempting to transform this weakness into strength by focusing on the historical and theoretical contexts that have [End Page 361] shaped the poet's works.6 Even so, to the extent that it foregrounds creative and critical contexts, such an effort—valuable as it is—often inadvertently contributes to the view that Byron's poetry is by itself not quite good enough by diverting attention away from its linguistic origins to its concrete material surroundings.7

However much one may wish to counter such an attitude toward Byron, and I want to do just that in what follows, its roots run deep. In Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo (1846), Thackeray disapproved of Byron in a way that still haunts criticism of the poet. In a chapter recounting his adventures in Athens, the novelist complains: "I have seen but two or three handsome women, and these had the great drawback which is common to the race—I mean, a sallow, greasy, coarse complexion, at which it was not advisable to look too closely" (343). Unencumbered by excessive tact, Thackeray links what he believes to be the dissembling surface of the female Mediterranean complexion to the sickly poetic effects he finds throughout Byron's verse:

I don't care for beauty which will only bear to be looked at from a distance, like a scene in a theatre. . . . They may talk about beauty, but would you wear a flower that had been dipped in a grease-pot? No; give me a fresh, dewy, healthy rose out of Somersetshire; not one of those superb, tawdry, unwholesome exotics, which are only good to make poems about. Lord Byron wrote more cant of this sort than any poet I know of. . . . That man never wrote from his heart. He got up rapture and enthusiasm with an eye to the public . . . .

(343)

Condemning what he perceives to be Byron's fatal predilection for theatrical artifice and his unseemly solicitation of readers, Thackeray draws a sharp line between the fresh-faced beauties of his native island and the artificiality of "unwholesome exotics." More to the point, the poet's inspiration never comes directly from "[the] heart," but typically comes as a response to fashion—to the superficial clamor of "the public."8

Far from fading with the passage of time, such views have persisted. In a well-known 1937 essay, T. S. Eliot criticized the poet not by invoking chauvinistic ethnic stereotypes but by faulting...

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