Editorial: Byron and America
- EditorialByron and America
With his usual foresight, Charles E. Robinson wrote the opening essay for this special issue of The Byron Journal forty years ago. In 'The Influence of Byron's Death on America' (5, 1977), he pointed to much of what you will find in the coming pages, connecting eulogies for Byron in the United States to philhellenism, commenting on Byron's associations with the U.S. Navy and the American arbiter of taste George Ticknor, and modeling the methodological commitments of what would become the New Historicism. Decades later, we are catching up and doing our best to follow the example of Robinson's inimitable scholarship and inspiring collegiality. Jeffery Vail's tribute is, then, a poignant recognition of a presence that is gratefully felt on every page of this volume. To borrow language from one of the American laments for Byron that Robinson summons in his own essay, Charlie's loss 'without depressing the price of stocks or affecting the election of the President, has produced a deep and general feeling of regret'.
As a collection, these six essays comprise a survey of America's Byron and Byron's America, advancing our knowledge of the scope and habitation of transatlantic Romanticism. Taken individually, each essay is a substantial contribution in its own right to Byron studies. Susan Wolfson investigates American Byrons and Byroniana, mapping the complexities of American influence. Peter Accardo explores Byron's fertile bibliophilic connection to Ticknor. Matt Sandler offers new insight into how and why Byron mattered to early African American writers. My essay pries open a spot of time, noticing the significance and legacy of Byron's visit to the USS Constitution. (In the following notes & queries piece my colleague Herbert Gilliland introduces us to two previously unpublished accounts of that visit.) William Keach presents a speculative history drawing connections between Byron's philhellenism and his affinity for America. Christopher Rovee takes the measure not only of mid-twentieth-century American critical assessments of Byron, but also of Byron's situation in the rivalries of formal and historical criticism.
We cover a lot of ground, from Byron's waning days in the Mediterranean to his revivifications in American suburbia and academia. Insofar as this collection both coheres and sprawls, it is analogous to Byron's 'posthumous existence' in America—substantial, intricate, and unending. [End Page v]
Noah Comet is Assistant Professor of English at the United States Naval Academy. He is the author of Romantic Hellenism and Women Writers (2013) and of several scholarly essays on Romantic poets including Hemans, Landon, Keats, and Byron. He is also the editor of two essay collections—one for Women's Studies on classical reception, the other (with Susan Wolfson) for Studies in Romanticism collating new scholarship on gender—and he is the creator of the Electronic Concordance to Keats's Poetry. As an environmentalist writer, he is also an occasional contributor to the Denver Post and the Baltimore Sun.
