12 - Byron's lyric poetry

Summary

Byron's lyric writing needs to be understood in the context of Romantic lyricism in general. This move is particularly important in Byron's case because his writing develops a Romantic 'style' as distinctive and as influential as Wordsworth's, although historical circumstances have obscured this situation. With certain few exceptions, for example, nineteenth-century British poets followed a Wordsworthian line while Europeans were taking their lead from Byron. Not until the legacy of Baudelaire permeated the twentieth century would an access to Byron's lyric procedures open up for poets writing in English.

Romanticism is regularly and usefully characterized in terms lifted from a certain set of adjectives, such as: subjective, impassioned, personal, sincere, spontaneous, reflective, self-conscious. The terms point toward a body of work that, however diverse in other respects, shares the common feature signalled by those various descriptors. Here are several famous Romantic passages, more or less randomly chosen:

Sund’ring, dark’ning, thund’ring!

Rent away with a terrible crash,

Eternity rolled wide apart,

Wide asunder rolling,

Mountainous, all around

Departing, departing, departing.

(Blake, The Book of Urizen, 12–17)