Figures in a Field: Revisiting Romantic Canonicity

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Thinking about what to write for this occasion, i found myself returning to an essay I published thirty-five years ago in Critical Inquiry about “The Pope Controversy,” a pamphlet war begun in the late Regency in which Byron was intensely engaged and which played a more than casual role, for example, in the shaping of Don Juan.¹ This essay was indebted to Jerome McGann in a number of ways, not least because for part of the month I spent researching it at the Clark Library in Los Angeles I was generously hosted by the McGanns in Pasadena, but also because of my trying to write about Byron for the first time. I now see that I was thinking through a problem in Byron that was central to the programmatic side of McGann’s polemical canon-oriented work on Romanticism through the 1980s and beyond.

In the essay itself, I defined that problem at the most abstract level as a question about how to come to terms with two divergent understandings of a critical canon that, so I argued, diverged dramatically in the Romantic period—and nowhere more visibly than in the debates about Pope. In one sense, a critical canon is just a list of writers who are deemed worthy of critical attention, typically a hierarchized list. In another sense, however, a critical canon is a set of norms, rules of procedure, guidelines for judgment. By the early nineteenth century, I argued, a kind of choosing of sides had begun to happen, not only between this or that poet, or this or that poetics, but about whether to start with the poets or the poetics in approaching critical questions.

Thus Pope, in the Essay on Criticism, can simultaneously issue two imperatives that might otherwise seem at odds. Both are cast in famous couplets:

First follow NATURE, and your Judgment frameBy her just Standard, which is still the same. . .Be Homer’s Works your Study, and DelightRead them by Day, and meditate by Night;

Pope suggests that Virgil, for one, had trouble with the seeming contradiction in these two commands until, after examination, he saw the light: “Nature and Homer were, he found, the same.”² For Pope, the canons of criticism and the canon of classics are one in nature.

A little over a century later, however, Byron would offer two famous injunctions of his own in the opening canto of Don Juan:

Thou shalt believe in Milton, Dryden, Pope;That shalt not set up Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey.³

Byron’s frame of reference here, as these paired trios of poets shows, is no longer an ancient canon but a modern English one. Indeed, long before Don Juan and the controversy over Pope, the relevant poetic horizon had begun to narrow from classicist to vernacular. A nationalist discourse begins to prevail in the scholarly work of the Wartons, and then in the first poets of the 1790s, especially William Lisle Bowles, the poet Coleridge cited in the Biographia as decisive for the shift to the new poetics of Lyrical Ballads. It was Bowles’s 1819 attack on Thomas Campbell for honoring Pope in his Specimens of the English Poets that launched the “official” phase of the Pope controversy.⁴

Shelley announced in 1821 that Pope had become “the pivot of a dispute in taste,” though taste does not fully capture what was at stake.⁵ Within the terms of this new nationalist critical dispensation, one problem with Pope was that he came to be seen as less oriented toward ancient Greece and more toward modern France, Britain’s chief cultural and political rival. In addition to this objection on nationalist grounds, however, there was another. If what Pope stood for was not universal, neither was it timeless. Indeed, his poetry came to be cast as the epitome of passing fashion. So claimed Wordsworth, famously, in the Essay Supplementary to the Preface of 1815:

The arts by which Pope . . . contrived to procure to himself a more general and a higher reputation than perhaps any Poet ever attained during his life-time are...