Byron and the Forms of Thought by Anthony Howe (review)

Early readings of Byron as shallow and unintellectual (vide Goethe and Arnold) led many twentieth- and some twenty-first-century critics to defend the poet’s philosophical underpinnings. But Byron’s oeuvre presented a problem for those searching for a sustained philosophical system. Contradictory ideas appear across the texts and one need only compare the first canto of Childe Harold to the last canto of Don Juan to understand the difficulty of speaking of Byron’s ‘philosophy’. In response to this conundrum, critics have repeatedly used Byron’s seemingly contrary viewpoints to trace his skeptical philosophy. This approach appears periodically in Byron studies, from early works such as Edward Marjarum’s Byron As Skeptic and Believer (1938), to the field-shifting studies in the mid-1980s by Anne Mellor and Donald Reiman, to Emily Bernhard Jackson’s recent The Development of Byron’s Philosophy of Knowledge (2010).

Anthony Howe’s book also discusses skepticism, but unlike some scholars (such as Terrence Hoagwood and Bernhard Jackson) Howe does not subordinate poetry in order to classify Byron as a particular kind of philosopher. Rather, Howe argues that in order to understand Byron’s engagement with philosophy, we must first understand the role poetry plays within the formation of thinking about and knowing the world. This study shifts the conversation about Byron’s philosophical theories from purely intertextual or historical points to questions of literary form. Redirecting our focus to poetry allows Howe to demonstrate the ways in which the forms of Byron’s works mimic the very philosophical questioning apparent in their content. Such an approach yields several rewards and also corrects an all too common problem in Byron studies: ‘There is a bad habit in Byron criticism of deciding that the poet is not being serious when he says things that don’t fit with the critic’s reading of him. This leads to critics choosing what they listen to rather than listening’. Part of the joy of reading this study comes from the author’s dedication to listening. What Howe hears in Byron is a unity of form and content that asks and invites readers to engage with poetry in order to overcome prevailing political ideologies.

Two other guiding spirits dictate the shape of Howe’s study: its form and its interest in argument. Written as a collection of essays rather than a study broken into chapters, Howe’s text deftly follows patterns of thought and form through Byron’s work in different genres. Divided into three sections, the essays focus on the intersection of philosophy, poetry, and politics. The first two parts of the book follow a pattern of theory-practice, with a first essay tracing the idea and a second essay explicating it. In Howe’s first section, ‘Philosophy’, the two essays examine skepticism in Byron’s works. The first essay demonstrates how Byron’s reading of Montaigne led him to view poetry as ‘something with a philosophical agency of its own’ that through form ‘becomes a way of reading the world against the grain of its objectification’. Rather than forcing poetry into the service of recording philosophy, Howe argues that poetry itself enables and encourages a kind of skeptical thinking. By focusing on Cain in the following essay, Howe is able to demonstrate the ways in which poetry allows for a skeptical approach to knowledge in both its form and content. Howe argues that ‘Byron’s relentless interest in language as a staging of philosophical and political intention’ recasts Cain as more than visionary poetry; the play functions as a dramatisation of ‘our rise and slide into the mind of modernity’.

Part II offers an even more pronounced examination of form – the ‘way of being’ of a textual thing – by juxtaposing Byron’s critical prose in one essay with his critical poetry in the next. In a much needed engagement with the influences and impulses behind Letter to John Murray and the Bowles debate, Howe unpacks Byron...