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Byron and the Forms of Thought byron and the forms of thought LIVERPOOL ENGLISH TEXTS AND STUDIES 61 Howe, Byron and the Forms of Thought.indd 1 20/08/2013 10:08:54 Howe, Byron and the Forms of Thought.indd 2 20/08/2013 10:08:54 BYRON AND THE FORMS OF THOUGHT ANTHONY HOWE LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS Howe, Byron and the Forms of Thought.indd 3 20/08/2013 10:08:54 First published 2013 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU Copyright © 2013 Anthony Howe The right of Anthony Howe to be identified as the author of this book has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A British Library CIP record is available ISBN 978-1-84631-971-6 cased Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY Howe, Byron and the Forms of Thought.indd 4 20/08/2013 10:08:54 Contents Abbreviations vi Preface vii Introduction 1 PART 1: PHILOSOPHY Essay I: ‘I doubt if doubt itself be doubting’: Scepticism, System and Poetry 15 Essay II: A ‘Voice from out the Wilderness’: Cain and Philosophical Poetry 43 PART 2: POETICS Essay III: The Need for ‘all this’: Johnson, Bowles and the Forms of Prose 75 Essay IV: ‘I wish to do as much by Poesy’: Amidst a Byronic Poetics 104 PART 3: OUTLINES Essay V: The Flower and the Gem: Narrative Form and the Traces of Eden 131 Essay VI: ‘Glory’s dream Unriddled’: Politics and the Forms of War 146 Coda: ‘In short’ 174 Bibliography 181 Index 191 v Howe, Byron and the Forms of Thought.indd 5 20/08/2013 10:08:54 Abbreviations CPW Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann and Barry Weller, 7 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–93). Byron’s poetry is quoted from this edition unless otherwise stated. BLJ Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 13 vols (London: John Murray, 1973–94) BMW Lord Byron: The Major Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) CMP Lord Byron: The Complete Miscellaneous Prose, ed. Andrew Nicholson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991) HVSV His Very Self and Voice: Collected Conversations of Lord Byron, ed. Ernest J. Lovell, Jr. (New York: Macmillan, 1954) vi Howe, Byron and the Forms of Thought.indd 6 20/08/2013 10:08:54 Preface This book has not come easily, nor would it have come at all were it not for quite a lot of other people. Listing them makes me realize that it might just have been worth it. A special mention goes to Bernard Beatty who is still teaching me about Byron and thought and poetry. For help of various hues I thank the following (none of you deserve alphabetical order): Michael O’Neill, Howard Erskine-Hill, Fred Parker, Simon Jarvis, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Corinna Russell, Duncan O’Connor, Alexander Regier, Gabriel Heaton, Peter Cochran, Patrick McGuinness, Geraldine Hazbun, Katherine Sutherland, Madeleine Callaghan, Philip Smallwood, Antoinette Renouf, Fiona Robertson, Gregory Leadbetter, Anthony Mellors, Stacey McDowell, Moira Redmond, Emma Weatherill and my family. You have all helped me write a book about Byron. I promise never to do it again. The doctoral thesis behind this book was supported financially by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Finishing the book was made possible by a period of research leave and the support of my colleagues at Birmingham City University. Liverpool University Press and Anthony Cond have been more than patient and more than very good. It’s an honour to keep up old connections. vii Howe, Byron and the Forms of Thought.indd 7 20/08/2013 10:08:54 In memory of Margaret Mary Howe MBE Howe, Byron and the Forms of Thought.indd 8 20/08/2013 10:08:54 Introduction In Julian Farino’s two-part BBC dramatization Byron (2003), the only writing of Byron’s to feature significantly is the manuscript of the poet’s memoirs, a work that only a handful of people ever read. The scene, we assume, is John Murray’s drawing room in Albemarle Street; present are Murray himself, John Cam Hobhouse, and other associates of the recently deceased poet. The book, amidst a series of uncertain and frightened looks, is thrown onto the fire, in the process burning into the biographical record one of its more famous holes. It is an effective opening scene, one that suggests a fruitful unshackling from history and an opportunity creatively to overwrite some intriguing blank spaces. But there is also in it something sadly symptomatic of how we have come to think of one of our greatest poets. Byron persists in the popular imagination. He made himself – and has been made into – one of the defining qualities of his own tumultuous age: Romantic, passionate, radical and mysterious. ‘Byronic’ has a cultural immediacy that is not there with ‘Wordsworthian’ or ‘Shelleyan’. Biographies of the poet are produced with unfailing energy. He regularly features on television and film where his life needs few fictional additives to stimulate twenty-first century appetites. He is a seminal figure respecting the modern obsession with celebrity.1 This afterlife, however, has been a very different affair to that of other eminent nineteenth- century literary figures such as Dickens or Jane Austen, writers identified primarily with their books and characters. Byron, we might easily conclude from his broader cultural status, was not really important as a writer at all. As a thinker he barely registers. Byron’s reconstruction as the definitive non-intellectual Romantic, as a poet of passion but not of thought, begins with weighty opinions such as Goethe’s: ‘Lord Byron is only great when he is writing poetry; as soon as he reflects, he is a child.’2 Matthew Arnold came to similar conclusions: Byron, it may be said, was eminent only by his genius, only by his inborn force and fire; he had not the intellectual equipment of a supreme modern 1 Howe, Byron and the Forms of Thought.indd 1 20/08/2013 10:08:54 2 byron and the forms of thought poet; except for his genius he was an ordinary nineteenth-century English gentleman, with little culture and no ideas.3 For Arnold, Byron represented something from which the national life of the mind needed to shift away; he stood for a redundant emotivism summarized by words such as ‘force’, ‘genius’ and ‘fire’ when what was needed was ‘intellectual equipment’ and ‘ideas’, neither of which Byron had to offer. T. S. Eliot agreed, identifying Byron’s apparent linguistic poverty as the sign of his secondariness: Of Byron one can say, as of no other English poet of his eminence, that he added nothing to the language, that he discovered nothing in the sounds, and developed nothing in the meaning, of individual words. I cannot think of any other poet of his distinction who might so easily have been an accomplished foreigner writing in English. The ordinary person talks English, but only a few people in every generation can write it; and upon this undeliberate collaboration between a great many people talking a living language and a very few people writing it, the continuance and maintenance of a language depends. Just as an artisan who can talk English beautifully while about his work or in a public bar, may compose a letter painfully written in a dead language bearing some resemblance to a newspaper leader, and decorated with words like ‘maelstrom’ and ‘pandemonium’: so does Byron write a dead or dying language.4 Byron may be a good storyteller, but he writes an ersatz poetry of surfaces in the ‘dead’ language of Romantic poetic diction; he works in decorative words lacking the modes of awareness essential to the poet’s grasp of things. What is perhaps puzzling about Eliot’s resonant criticism is his determination to read Byron in the singular, as if the Oriental Tales, all four cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Don Juan were all made of the same stuff. The distinctness of the latter, which is decidedly proto- Modernist in so far as it picks up the baton from Tristram Shandy, is not allowed.5 After all, it was Byron among the major Romantics who came to insist that one should be able to make a poem about a fried egg as well as a sunset. It was Byron, also, who subjected the linguistic deadness Eliot identifies in Romanticism to its most extensive interrogation in its own day. Where Auden, in his brilliant ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, threw out the ‘trash’ of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage but held to the ‘fine’ Don Juan,6 Eliot wants to purge us wholesale of a monotone Byron who is ridiculously stuck to his time. Byron criticism is a history of more or less comprehensible swerves from Byron. The poet’s self-mythologizing has been taken on and extended by others to the extent that he has become one of the most Howe, Byron and the Forms of Thought.indd 2 20/08/2013 10:08:54 introduction 3 written poets in the language. Bertrand Russell, who devoted an entire chapter of his History of Western Philosophy to Byron, picked up on this twinning of Byron and ‘Byron’. For Russell, however, the latter was the significant one: L‘ ike many other prominent men, he was more important as a myth than as he really was.
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