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from Part III - Literary Cultures
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 October 2019
Contradiction was Byron’s keynote. He initiated his career in rhyme with a gesture of disavowal: “Poetry, however, is not my primary vocation” (CPW I: 33), the young Lord announced in the preface to Hours of Idleness (1807). Any consideration of Byron and literary theory needs to be alive to his testy relationship with what he famously dismissed as “the mart / For … poetic diction” (CPW V: 391, ll. 685–6). But it is also clear that Byron lived and breathed literature, conceiving of it as a total system. It was the material system of publishing; a court-styled marketplace run by “the Allied Sovereigns of Grub-Street” (BLJ 8: 207); a social institution that transacted the business of authorial fame and afterlife; a conversation; an experiment in thought and sense; a tribute to and tributary of the flotsam and jetsam of everyday life; and a source of life itself. As Byron asked rhetorically of Don Juan, “is it not life, is it not the thing?” (BLJ 6: 232).
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