The Perversity of Poetry: Romantic Ideology and the Popular Male Poet of Genius

4. POETRY AND PATHOLOGY

FOUR POETRY AND PATHOLOGY Would you thank a man for fitting up your study, and adorning it with much that is beautiful; and if, at the same time, he filled it with images and ghosts of the most disgusting and awful description, which were to abide there, and be continually dancing around you all your life? Is he a benefactor to his species, who, here and there, throws out a beautiful thought, or a poetic image, but, as you stoop to pick it up, chains upon you a putrid carcass which you can never throw off? I believe a single page may be selected from Lord Byron’s works, which has done more hurt to the mind and the heart of the young than all his writings have ever done good; but he will quickly pass from notice, and is doomed to be exiled from the libraries of all virtuous men. It is a blessing to the world, that what is putrid must soon pass away. The carcass hung in chains will be gazed at for a short time in horror; but men will soon turn their eyes away, and remove even the gallows on which it swung. —Reverend John Todd, The Student’s Manual BYRON USES WHAT POWERS OF ENCHANTMENT HE COMMANDS IN his poetry not to bury the past in the past (the mourning work that in Scott reburies the wizard in his tomb even as it rebinds the wizard’s tome against the endless return that is the reading act), but instead uses his enchanter’s wand to cast the present as past, thus completely recasting the ideological effect of the romance form. As I argued in the previous chapter, Byron wakes the dead not to bury them once and for all through the work of nostalgic mourning but to have them speak their melancholy-producing injunctions again and again to the present. His Childe Harold in particular is peopled by those ghosts that haunt the present, peopled, as the Reverend John Todd puts it in his extremely popular Student’s Manual (1835), by “ghosts of the most disgusting and awful description” that threaten to be “continually dancing around you all your life.”1 Byron offers the reader a “putrid carcass which you can never throw off.” He refuses to let the dead lie and thus opens up a crack in the present—the ubi sunt of the hic et nunc. Is it so surprising that, perhaps as a result, one of the images associated with Byron over the course of the nineteenth century was the undead Vampyre of Polidori’s tale, a story first attributed to Byron himself?2 One might say, in fact, that the nineteenth century responded to the revolutionary potential in Byron’s texts by attempting to exorcise Byron’s 105 106 the perversity of poetry undead spirit—to doom him to exile “from the libraries of all virtuous men”—and to bury once and for all the figure of the revolutionary melancholic he inspired. To do so, the nineteenth-century critic had to neutralize the radical potential of Byron’s poetics by reducing the poet, as we will see, to no more than an adolescent sexual perversity.The strategy of subsequent reviewers was doubleedged : they acknowledged the radical power of Byron’s position but they also undercut that position through the disciplining of the body—hanging the rebel’s carcass in chains on the gallows, if necessary. Their response took the form of three interrelated strategies: 1) diagnosing the body of Byron as perverse (effeminate , ill, mad, corrupt, or, as Lady Caroline Lamb put it,“mad, bad, and dangerous to know”); 2) diagnosing the bodily act of writing poetry, particularly Byronic, Romantic poetry, as inherently pathological; 3) diagnosing the body politic as a cohesive social entity that requires the administration of specialists.Through such power of embodiment, reviewers sought to counter the resistance to normative frames in Byron’s idiosyncratic reworking of the romance form in Childe Harold and his other works.The romance, along with Romantic ideology, was thus also successfully stereotyped for posterity as but an adolescent pursuit that one must grow out of in order to reach healthy and productive adulthood, a characterization that eventually also swallowed up Scott’s own romance forms despite his rhetoric of health and archaic purity. Byron represented for nineteenth-century critics the curse to Scott’s cure, as I suggested in chapter 2, and as Carlyle facetiously put it before dismissing Scott along...