2 - Byron Agonistes, 1809–1816

Summary

From 1809 to 1816 Byron used his own life experiences, not least their failures and spectacular self-deceptions, to draw up an insidious contract with a readership of secret sharers. Byron learned from Pope how to fashion an array of disturbing verse practices – implicitly addressed to a social order of “The mad, the bad, the useless, and the base” – that called readers to demanding acts of attention and self-attention. The poetry of 1809–1816 unfolds a wide range of “perversifications” to expose the airbrushed language of a canting world, with The Siege of Corinth being the culminating poetic act of dark revelation.