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THREE BYRON’S SPECTROPOETICS AND REVOLUTION Why must one begin with a poem when one speaks of the gift? And why does the gift always appear to be the gift of the poem? —Jacques Derrida, Given Time No one ever made a bargain in verse. —Adam Smith, Lectures on Rhetoric UNLIKE SCOTT,BYRON COMPLICATEDTHE HARMONIZING FUNCTION of the romance by “unromantically” discussing the present. This chapter will argue that Byron countered Scott’s efforts both to familiarize the past and to harmonize antagonism by instead defamiliarizing the present and inciting revolution, thus completely recasting the ideological effect of the romance form. Byron’s ideas held the potential for disruptive effects because he fused the temporal dynamics of the romance form to an all-encompassing satire of the present, thus countering Scott’s fetishistic nostalgia with an insistent melancholia that sought to “disjoint” a reader’s relationship to the status quo. Byron’s contemporizing of the medieval also drew attention to the textuality of his medium, thus opposing the Cult of the Book explored in the previous chapter. Byron however sought to escape the threatened commodification of his poetry by offering the reader an alternate way of understanding one’s relation to the market and to the dominant ideologies of the day. It was the specter of this alternate vision that haunted the critical reviewers of the rest of the century, impelling various apotropaic maneuvers against this threatening spirit of poetry. Poetry’s influence in the Romantic period is all too easily forgotten after poetry’s utter marginalization in the twentieth century.This chapter argues that this eventual marginalization is due not only to the rise of the novel and the mass market, and not only to the tendency, encouraged by Scott, to view poetry as a rarefied form outside the concerns of the present, but also to nineteenth-century society’s active response to a perceived threat in poetry’s critique of the emergent social order.As chapter 4 illustrates, the sort of poetry associated with Byron’s Satanic school was actively exorcized to obscurity by 71 72 the perversity of poetry nineteenth-century periodical reviews, psychological tracts, and even medical treatises that feared the effects of reading such poetry and therefore aligned hyper-Romantic, idealist poetry and its attendant “temperament,” the nervous disposition, with the worst sorts of physical effects: masturbation, pathology, degeneration, madness, and death. For now, however, this chapter will set aside the nineteenth-century reception of Byron’s corpus as perverse in order to explore what precisely is most threatening in Byron’s work. Does the sexualization of Romantic poetry after Byron perhaps hide what is truly disruptive in such poetic texts? We must ask, after all:Why all this concern about poetry, a concern that, at first blush, appears to make little sense to us today? As I argue here, one reason for this phenomenon is that poetry after Byron was felt to offer the reader a truly radical critique of capitalist exchange and of the various ideological maneuvers that sustained political economy and the status quo.1 The sexualizing rhetoric discussed in chapter 4 was designed, in part, to counteract by emasculating this more serious threat. BYRON’S REVOLUTIONARY ROMANCE Identified as secretly aristocratic, attacked as amoral, diagnosed as pathological, dismissed as lacking any consistent system of thought, Byron has been laughed out of the house of literary criticism through most of the last two centuries. Reading earlier critical work on Byron, one is put in mind of Stephen Dedalus, who in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man asserts that he thinks Byron is the greatest poet. The response from his friends is first ridicule— “ ‘He’s only a poet for uneducated people’ ”—then moral outrage—“ ‘In any case Byron was a heretic and immoral too’ ”—and finally violence: —Behave yourself! cried Heron, cutting at Stephen’s legs with his cane. It was the signal for their onset. Nash pinioned his arms behind while Boland seized a long cabbage stump which was lying in the gutter. Struggling and kicking under the cuts of the cane and the blows of the knotty stump Stephen was borne back against a barbed wire fence. —Admit that Byron was no good. —No. —Admit. —No. —Admit. —No. No. (81–82) The goal of this chapter is not to defend Byron from attacks directed against his person or his actions.What I wish to do is to take what Byron had...

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