Chapter 8 - ‘I ne’er mistake you for a personal foe’: Byron and Wordsworth

Summary

The polarisation of Byron and Wordsworth takes on a cartoonish tinge in the light of their poetic enmity. Byron’s bombastic lines, ‘Thou shalt believe in Milton, Dryden, Pope; / Thou shalt not set up Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey’, claim to reject Wordsworth’s circle in favour of an earlier triumvirate.¹ Readers are, only half-mockingly, asked to choose between one school and another. This stark choice often sets the tone for critical debates.² Yet the gulf between Byron and Wordsworth, as Jane Stabler and Philip Shaw have shown, is less wide than either poet cared to admit.³ Wordsworth and Byron converge upon and diverge from markedly similar points. The epic genre, Milton and his influence, and the shaping of poetic tastes become key areas of dispute for both poets. Both claim Milton in particular for very different reasons. Milton, for Byron, is an ethical and political figure used to sponsor his own self-image, where Wordsworth’s ‘reverence for his great original’ colours both his blank verse epic and his introspective mode.⁴ Despite their significant similarities, however, the sense remains that the two poets set themselves up in opposition to one another, shaping and defining themselves oppositionally in their political allegiances and formal choices. While Byron dealt in public sallies against Wordsworth and the Lake School, Wordsworth’s animus against the younger poet led him to participate in and encourage what Jerome McGann has called a ‘campaign of vilification’ against Byron.⁵ Poetic enmity proved to be a more potent and vital form of influence than alliance as Byron and Wordsworth fought to set the taste of a nation.