Modernity in the long Romanticism: The Case of Byron

© Shobhana Bhattacharji/’Modernity in the long Romanticism: The Case of Byron’

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Shobhana Bhattacharji

Modernity during the Long Romanticism: The Case of Byron

Abstract

Modern, modernism, and modernity are slippery terms as much as Romanticism is. Taking advantage of their uncertainty of meaning, I will look at the ways in which Byron was of his time as well as modern, at the complex relationship between him and the early 20C moderns, and how -- if at all -- he has survived. Is it as a modern, a relic of the past, or has he been renewed by some ideas of modernity. I hope to show that the fuzziness of meaning of Modern, Modernism, Modernity, and Romanticism have enriched the reading of the Romantics, especially Byron.

‘Favoured dates for the origin of the [modernist] movement are 1848, when after the brutal suppression of the revolutions of that year classical or realist writing lurched into crisis in the works of Charles Baudelaire and Gustave Flaubert; or the 1880s, when a long series of accelerating aesthetic experimentalism got under way: from Naturalism through Symbolism to Cubism, Expressionism, Futurism, Constructivism, Surrealism and others. The high point of modernism, by general consent, is the years from 1910 to 1930, after which modernist artists in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia were silenced or persecuted, and elsewhere in Europe a reaction towards realist aesthetics -- social responsibility rather than individual experiment in art -- set in as a response to the increasing political polarization of the Continent.’ -- A Dictionary of Marxist Thought (1991).1 There is no entry for ‘modernity’ in A Dictionary of Marxist Thought.

‘The revolutionary in art could easily be confused with the revolutionary in politics [. . .] and both could be equally easily confused with something very

I presented this paper at the International Interdisciplinary Conference, Literature

And The Long Modernity, organized by the Romanian Cultural Institute and the British Cultural Studies Centre, University of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania, 10-12 November 2011. It was published in the proceedings of the conference. I am grateful to Professor Mihaela Irimia for inviting me to speak at this excellent conference.

1 A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, Second edition, ed. Tom Bottomore et al (1983; rpt.

New Delhi: Maya Blackwell, 1991).


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different, namely “modernity” -- a word which is first recorded around 1849.’2

What sense of the modern did the Romantics have? Is there continuity from Romanticism to modernism ‘proper’ and beyond? Could we use ‘Long Romanticism’ as a real description of a phenomenon rather than a clever sounding phrase?

In this paper, ‘Romanticism’ is British Romanticism (1790-1830); ‘the Romantics’ are the six canonical British Romantic poets, though Byron will be the protagonist; the ‘modernists’ are (chiefly) poets of about 1890-1930.3 T.S.Eliot is my example of a modernist poet: he had strong views about the Romantics.

I will start with how ‘modern’ and ‘romantic’ have been used recently; then explore what the Romantics meant by ‘modern;’ and end with some tentative ideas about long romanticism. For this paper, I have assumed that modern, modernism, and modernity are a word cluster rather than individual terms.

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A simple statement is a good way to start. Like Romanticism, modern, modernism, and modernity are difficult to define yet widely used. Some examples: • 1853: Matthew Arnold: ‘This strange disease of modern life.’4 • 1880: Goethe: Byron is the only ‘representative of the modern poetical era

[…] neither antique nor romantic, but like the present day itself.’5 • 1936: Modern Times -- Charlie Chaplin’s film about the Depression. • 1977: David Lodge, The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy and the

2 E.J.Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, 1848-1875 (1975; rpt. London: Cardinal, 1991), p.346.

3 The dates are the symmetrical (and arbitrary) but not rigid. Another symmetry:

Alexander Pope b. 1888; Byron b. 1788; T.S.Eliot b. 1888. 4 O born in days when wits were fresh and clear,

And life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames; Before this strange disease of modern life,

With its sick hurry, its divided aims, Its heads o'ertax'd, its palsied hearts, was rife— (Matthew Arnold, The Scholar Gypsy, 1853)

5 Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann and Soret, translated from the German by John

Oxenford (London: George Bell, 1880? 1883? 1889?). googlebooks.


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Typology of Modern Literature.6 • 2000 (a review): For Baudelaire, ‘whoever says Romanticism, says modern

art.’7 • 2008: Duncan Wu, William Hazlitt: The First Modern Man.8 From this list -- you will have your own examples -- it appears that ‘modern’ travels freely across time and meaning. But is it possible to get a less diffuse idea of it? According to a random survey of The London Review of Books of the last two decades, contributors used ‘Modern’ adjectivally for poets, science, women, a language association (MLA), the world,9 countries, war, ambition, masculinity, and for how ‘modern universalism’ started with the French Revolution’s desire to do away with difference.10 ‘Early modern’ appeared from about 2005 to describe Europe from the 13th to the early 17th centuries,11 which is not a new idea, of course, but this is when it turns up in the LRB of the last twenty years, during which time -- curiously -- ‘modern’ was seldom used for a literary period. But in 2002, modern British fiction was said to have begun in the 1950s, and included Indian writers and crime writers, which would have surprised the culturally exclusive ‘high modernists’ of the early twentieth century.12 If (as implied in the LRB), ‘Late modern’ refers to the 1990s and

6 David Lodge, The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy and the Typology of

Modern Literature (London: Hodder Arnold, 1977). 7 Graham Robb, quoting Anita Brookner’s Romanticism and its Discontents, LRB Vol.

22 No. 20 (19 October 2000), pp.21-22. 8 Matthew Bevis, ‘Deleecious,’ LRB vol.23 No.21 (November 2008), pp. 26-28. Was

Hazlitt the first modern man because he was always ‘working frantically to meet deadlines?’

9 Roy Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (Penguin, 2000).

10 From a random search of The London Review of Books. 11 16th century, 13th-16th centuries; and the late 16th to early 17th centuries. 12 See Terry Eagleton, ‘In the Company of Confreres,’ review of On Modern British Fiction ed. by Zachary Leader (Oxford, 2002), LRB, Vol. 24 No. 24 (12 December 2002), pp.31-32:

During the half-century since 1950, Lindsay Duguid writes in an essay in this collection, ‘the lady novelist turned into the woman writer,’ the historical novel became respectable once again, crime fiction became respectable for the first time, and the English novel was reborn as the British novel. Indian


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beyond, then the late modern notion of modern literature is even baggier. In a 1996 study of the modern epic, for example, ‘pivotal works of literary modernity’ were Goethe’s Faust II, Joyce’s Ulysses, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Moby Dick, and Pound’s Cantos, all -- according to the author -- long, boring and ‘internally discontinuous.’ George Steiner, in his review of the book, said another list of the modern epic might begin ‘with the extraordinary modulation of the epic–heroic into the private and introspective in Wordsworth’s Prelude and Excursion,’ go on to Byron’s comic epic, Don Juan, and end with Solzhenitsyn’s August 1914 (1970).13 Although he was half joking about these DIY lists, as he called them, Steiner pointed to the continuation of Romantic newness into modernism. Even so, the closer one gets to ‘modern,’ the more it seems to vanish.

How did LRB reviewers use ‘Romantic’ in these two decades?14 Except for calling Philip Larkin ‘the Last Romantic,’15 they used ‘Romantic’ for people and events of a specific period (Wordsworth, Byron, Joseph Priestley etc.; science, travel, revolution etc.).16 But I suspect that modern and modernism, already spread over time and ideas, are about to be further complicated, for quite suddenly in 2011 (our modernity, if you like), Romantic Modern appears in the title of a book. Its author claims that T.S.Eliot’s Four Quartets show his ‘unqualified commitment to rural England;’ in his review of the book, Julian

novelists revealed a ‘fondness for identical twins’, while angels, giants, babies and women who pass as men grew curiously fashionable. ‘In 1999, three British novels and one American novel featured a heroine in a coma.’

13 George Steiner, Rev. Franco Moretti’s The Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to García Márquez (1996), LRB vol.18 No.10 (23 May 1996), p.14.

14 Robb writes of its ‘large retinue of definitions’ in France, but in England,

‘Romantic’ was not used for the Romantics until much later. 15 John Bayley, in his review of Andrew Motion’s biography of Philip Larkin, LRB 1985: Larkin has been called ‘“The John Clare of the building estates,”’ ‘“the saddest heart in the post-war supermarket;”’ for Larkin, as for Keats, ‘the erotic is elsewhere.’

16 ‘Romantic fiction’ is used in a study of Mills and Boon, publisher of formulaic

romances directly descended from the Minerva Press of the Romantic period. The tall dark mysterious silent male prototype of Darcy, Heathcliff, Rochester, and the Mills and Boon / Minerva Press / Georgette Heyer romantic heroes is adapted from the Byronic hero. See e.g. Andrew Elfenbein, Byron and the Victorians, Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth Century Literature and Culture (No.4) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).


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Bell, complained that the author had not heard ‘the underlying drone of revulsion’ which linked Four Quartets to The Waste Land, Eliot’s ‘exemplary modernist performance’ of nineteen years earlier.17

When faced with confusion of meaning, I turn to the OED. ‘Modern’ -– it says -- means being in existence at this time, current, present. But what is ‘this time?’ For historians, ‘modern’ is the entire period after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, or everything subsequent to the middle ages. Yet from 1864 the close of the 15th century was ‘universally recognized as the starting point of Modern.’ ‘Modern’ also relates to the present and recent times as opposed to the remote past. Modern movements in art, for example, are characterized by a departure from or repudiation of the past. But in 1820, Henry Fuseli thought modern art had debased the art of the ancients,18 whereas in 1927, Clive Bell traced the ‘whole glorious history of modern art’ in England to Constable’s innovations (i.e., the very period T.S.Eliot felt had been bad for English poetry). Modern people, according to the OED, embrace innovation and new ideas. This may be true, but not everyone in the modernist period admired them for it. D.H.Lawrence, for one, deprecated Clifford Chatterley’s collecting ‘very modern pictures, at very moderate prices’ (the OED’s example).

When did ‘Modern literature’ begin? Who is a modern writer? The OED says that Gray’s ‘Ode to Vicissitude’ and the final quatrain of his ‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard’ were considered modern in 1885. In 1897, ten years after the start of modernism proper, ‘The old moderns [were said to be] Chaucer, Spenser, and Le Sage (18C).’19 So now we get Old moderns and New moderns. This was not much help.

Was the Romantic sense of ‘modern’ was less contradictory?

17 Julian Bell, ‘Bourgeois Reveries,’ review of Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists

and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper by Alexandra Harris (Thames and Hudson, October 2010), LRB Vol. 33 No. 3 (3 February 2011), pp. 6-8. In what seems at first glance a startling departure from the apparently settled meaning of ‘romantic,’ is James Wood on the deliberately ‘antiquarian’ language of W.G.Sebald’s Austerlitz:

Note the slightly quaint, Romantic sound of those phrases about the moths:

‘until the last breath is out of their bodies […] the place where they came to grief.’

18 ‘Fancy-Pictures’ of modern art had debased the ‘Phantasiæ of the ancients.’ 19 The Daily Telegraph, 1864, quoted in Richard B.Heilman. ‘Post-Tomorrow and

Tomorrow and Tomorrow: An Aspect of the Humanistic Tongue,’ The Sewanee Review Vol. 96, No. 4, (Fall, 1988), pp. 703-713, Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27545971


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2. Very broadly, Shelley and Coleridge used ‘modern’ in relation to politics to mean ‘contemporary,’ usually something nasty, such as ‘promoters of utility’ in ‘modern England,’ whose ‘unmitigated exercise of the calculating faculty’ had exasperated ‘the extremes of luxury and want’ (Shelley); or the ‘modern patriotism’ of government ministers responsible for the gagging bills (Coleridge). 20

But when the Romantics used ‘modern’ in connection with literature, the term became elastic. Who, for instance, did they think of as modern poets? Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton, said Shelley.21 ‘The poetry of Dante,’ he said, ‘may be considered as the bridge thrown over the stream of time which unites the modern and the antient world.’ Wordsworth planned to base his modern poetry on the work of hitherto marginal British poets like MacPherson, and he (Wordsworth) would be the bridge between them and ‘modern times.’ 22 Coleridge admired poets from Donne to Cowley because despite their ‘subtleties of intellect, and […] starts of wit,’ they wrote ‘the most pure and genuine mother English,’ while the ‘false beauty’ of the moderns came from a perpetual ‘glare and glitter’ of imagery that was an amphibious something, ‘half

20 Shelley, Defence of Poetry. In Biographia Literaria, Chapter 10, Coleridge says that he

[...] levelled my attacks at "modern patriotism", and even ventured to declare my belief that whatever the motives of ministers might have been for the sedition (or as it was then the fashion to call them, the gagging) bills, yet the bills themselves would produce an effect to be desired by all the true friends of freedom, as far as they should contribute to deter men from openly declaiming on subjects, the principles of which they had never bottomed, and from "pleading to the poor and ignorant, instead of pleading for them.

21 It occurs fourteen times in Shelley’s Defence of Poetry. 22 Wordsworth’s second use of ‘modern’ in the Preface is

‘Readers of superior judgment may disapprove of the style in which many of these pieces are executed [...] [but] the more conversant the reader is with our elder writers, and with those in modern times who have been the most successful in painting manners and passions, the fewer complaints of this kind will he have to make.’ (Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1798).

The third is:

The lines entitled Expostulation and Reply, and those which follow, arose out of conversation with a friend who was somewhat unreasonably attached to modern books of moral philosophy.


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image and half abstract meaning.’23 But despite their differences, the Romantics seemed to agree that the best

new poetry would be a combination of emulating ‘elder poets’ and rejecting the worst of contemporary poets. Language, too, had to be remade, which led to famous disputes about how this was to be done. Wordsworth’s ‘language such as men do use’ exasperated Coleridge but it pleased Shelley. Yet the distinguishing feature of modern literature, Shelley said, was its unprecedented (another word for ‘modern’) ‘intense and comprehensive imagery,’ which was ultimately derived from the Reformation and Republican Milton. (Joining with the past or breaking with it are never clearly worked out by the Romantics)

Byron was less fanciful. He used ‘Modern’ uniformly to mean contemporary.24 He too admired certain ‘elder poets’ -- Shakespeare, Spenser, Ben Jonson, Waller, Dryden, Congreve, Young, Shenstone, Thomson, Dr.Johnson, Goldsmith, and Gray. But -- and this is where he parts company with his cotemporaries (his preferred word) -- the two poets he really admired were Alexander Pope (1688–1744) and Horace (65 BC–8 BC), though he also said he could not respond to Horace’s ‘lyric flow.’25 The modern poets he

23 ‘One great distinction, I appeared to myself to see plainly, between, even the

characteristic faults of our elder poets, and the false beauty of the moderns. In the former, from DONNE to COWLEY, we find the most fantastic out-of-the-way thoughts, but in the most pure and genuine mother English; in the latter, the most obvious thoughts, in language the most fantastic and arbitrary. Our faulty elder poets sacrificed the passion, and passionate flow of poetry, to the subtleties of intellect, and to the starts of wit; the moderns to the glare and glitter of a perpetual, ||hete||rogeneous imagery, or rather to an amphibious something, made up, half of image, and half of abstract* meaning.’ Interestingly, Coleridge admired Des Cartes, ‘Des Cartes who (in his meditations) himself first, at least of the moderns, gave a beautiful example of this voluntary doubt, this self-determined indetermination, happily expresses its utter difference from the scepticism of vanity or irreligion [...]’ (Biographia Literaria, Chapter 12).

24 In English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, he said that virtually all modern literature was

bad; English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. Later, that modern Greek poetry, was as good as that of ancient Greece -- both lent value to ‘spots’ and ancient ruins. Ravenna, Feb 7, 1821, Beauties of Byron, p.103. Earlier, he writes of modern Rome having been built using the stones of ancient buildings. In ‘Napoleon at Helena,’ Napoleon is ‘modern;’ in Don Juan he is a ‘modern Mars’ (Canto 10).

25 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto IV.77:

Then farewell, Horace; whom I hated so, Not for thy faults, but mine; it is a curse


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disliked were ‘the Lakers’ (Byron’s term) -- Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey. He presented his mixed attitude to them as an uncomplicated opposition: ‘The great cause of the present deplorable state of English Poetry,’ was due to the ‘absurd and systematic depreciation of Pope.’26 The ‘new School of Critics and Scribblers’ think ‘themselves poets because they do not write like Pope.’27

Byron’s vehemence is infectious but we need to remember that he admired George Crabbe (1754-1832) as the postscript to the Augustans. He also admired Samuel Rogers (1763-1855) and Thomas Campbell (1777-1844) insofar as they were in continuity with the eighteenth century. What he did not like was the disruption of that continuity in poetry, which was one sense of 'modern' for the Romantics. In politics, however, Byron was sympathetic to the political changes in the modern world and did not care whether they broke continuity or not – ‘the king times are finishing,’ he said, without regret. Hence, his respect for continuity could be interpreted in two ways. (We’re not going into that.)

The Romantics disagreed about which literary inheritance made them modern, but they also envied each other’s contemporary or modern status.

To understand, not feel thy lyric flow, To comprehend, but never love thy verse: Although no deeper Moralist rehearse Our little life, nor Bard prescribe his art, Nor livelier Satirist the conscience pierce, Awakening without wounding the touch'd heart,

Yet fare thee well -- upon Soracte's ridge we part.

26 In which for the last few years ‘there has been a kind of Epidemical concurrence’ (Hints from Horace, ed. Peter Cochran; ‘Byron refers to Horace more often than he does any other poet except Shakespeare,’ pp. 226, 1). <http://petercochran.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/hints_from_horace.pdf> [19. 10. 2011]. Andrew Rutherford, Byron: A Critical Study (Stanford University Press, 1961), p.105. Also at Google books [11. 10. 2011]. Pope was ‘the most moral poet of all civilization,’ his verse was ‘the Christianity of English Poetry,’ Byron said. From Hints from Horace (1811) to a note on Pope (1820), it seems that Byron consistently condemned those who opposed ‘the urbane wit and mature good sense of Pope’ (Hints from Horace). Even Saintsbury who judged Byron to be ‘a poet distinctly of the second class, and not even the best of the second class,’ admitted that he ‘had more than a hankering after the classical ideals in literature [...] all his life long inclined in his heart to the Popian school’ (Saintsbury, pp.80, 76).

27 CPW 4, pp.224-225, quoted in Rutherford, pp.105-106.


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More precisely, everyone envied the popularity of Scott and Byron. When Shelley prophesied that great contemporary writers would in the

future become ‘the companions and forerunners of some unimagined change in our social condition or the opinions which cement it,’ 28 he expressed a Romantic ambition to be remembered, to be among the ‘great dead,’ as Keats put it. The ambition is implicit in Wordsworth’s plan to democratize poetry. He seemed to have believed that if he wrote about ordinary events in ordinary words in their natural order, he would be a popular poet. Being popular was a respectable thing. To sell thousands of copies of their work like Scott and Byron was a goal much desired by writers of the time.29

‘Considerably astonished at the temporary success’ of his works, Byron tried to understand why he was popular. He attributed it to his passion, and to putting experience before trying to change taste (i.e., theorizing). 30 Being popular also gave him a perspective on popularity, he felt, and set him apart him from Wordsworth, who (Byron said) is essentially ‘a bad writer [. . .] he will never have a public.’31 Byron was wrong about that, but he was right about the importance of popularity in literary tradition. To earn a place in the future -- an important goal for the Romantics -- a writer had to be popular in his own time: Homer’s Glory

depended upon his present popularity [Byron said] […] all the great poets of Antiquity were the delight of their cotemporaries. The very existence of a poet previous to the invention of printing depended upon his present popularity – and how often has it impaired his future fame? Hardly ever; history informs us that the best have come down to us. The reason is evident – the most popular found the greater number of transcribers for their Mss […]32

28 Shelley, Preface, Prometheus Unbound. 29 ‘[...]"Scott's thirty thousand copies sold" ... must sadly discomfort poor Southey's

unsaleables’ (Byron, Note, Hints from Horace). 30 ‘I have never contemplated the prospect of filling [...] permanently a station in

the literature of the Country,’ he said. 31 ‘It may be asked why[...]I have not [...] endeavoured to correct rather than

encourage the taste of the Day. To this I would answer, that it is easier to perceive the wrong than to pursue the right, and that I have never contemplated the prospect of filling [...] permanently a station in the literature of the Country’ (Hints from Horace).

32 Byron, Hints from Horace (1811), ed. by Peter Cochran, International Byron Society site <http://www.internationalbyronsociety.org/images/stories/pdf_files/hints_horace.pdf>[4. 10. 2011].


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Byron’s commonsense and historicized explanation of how literature of the

past travels to the future along the highway of popularity connects him with the ancients and with popular culture. But does it also connect him with our modernity?

The last part of my paper will be a three-part collage: Politics and Byron; Poetics and Byron; Popular culture and Byron. Politics and Byron An aspect of the modern world, which more or less coincided with literary modernism, was the decline or end of empires. During this time, Byron was a role model for nationalist writers who wanted to be known as the Byrons of their nascent nations during their anti-imperialist struggles.33 We know this. In India, one such writer was Michael Madhusudan Dutt who came to Byron via Thomas Moore’s Life of Byron. Dutt chose his biographer even before he had written any nationalist poetry.34 However, Byron’s role as a political lodestar

33 Saintsbury’s ‘modernist’ assessment was that

Although opinions about Byron differ very much, there is one point about him which does not admit of difference of opinion. No English poet, perhaps no English writer except Scott (or rather "The Author of Waverley"), has ever equalled him in popularity at home; and no English writer, with Richardson and Scott again as seconds, and those not very close ones, has equalled him in contemporary popularity abroad. The vogue of Byron in England, though overpowering for the moment, was even at its height resisted by some good judges and more strait-laced moralists; and it ebbed, if not as rapidly as it flowed, with a much more enduring movement. But abroad he simply took possession of the Continent of Europe and kept it. He was one of the dominant influences and determining causes of the French Romantic movement; in Germany, though the failure of literary talent and activity of the first order in that country early in this century made his school less important, he had great power over Heine, its one towering genius; and he was almost the sole master of young Russia, young Italy, young Spain, in poetry. Nor, though his active and direct influence has of course been exhausted by time, can his reputation on the Continent be said to have ever waned. (Saintsbury, p.78).

34 ‘Exploring new forms of poetry, hating the “philistinism of a settled and

contented life,” Dutt longed “`for a subject with oceanic and mountain scenery, with sea-voyages, battle and love adventures.’” Moved to tears by Tom Moore’s description of Byron’s death, he wrote to a friend in 1842, “‘Oh! How I should


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ended in about 1947 when India won its Independence from Britain, to be rapidly followed by other colonies. An odd return of Byron in a political context cropped up in 2008, in the British Pakistani writer Nadeem Aslam’s novel, The Wasted Vigil, set in present day Afghanistan. In it, Lara, a Russian woman, comes to Afghanistan looking for her brother, a Soviet soldier. As her hopes fade, she finds an illustration of Byron’s verse tale, Mazeppa (1819). In this poem, when Mazeppa’s adultery is discovered, he is tied to the back of a horse and set loose.

More and more these days [writes Nadeem Aslam], Lara’s interest was caught by personalities and events on the edges of wars, by lives that have yet to arrive at one of history’s conflicts [. . .] of lives being lived with a major battle occurring just over the horizon [… ].35

If this wasn’t a one-off occurrence, one might feel that the new role for political Byronism is not at the heroic centre but on the unheroic margins of contemporary wars.

Other well-known political connections between Byron and politics occurred in the 1930s and 40s, when Bertrand Russell blamed Byronism for the rise of fascism, while W.H.Auden pleaded for Byron’s help in coping with it. Nothing similar has happened to Byron after World War 2. We may assume that his political role in the making of the modern world is over. That afterlife of Byron is dead.

Poetics and Byron Auden complimented Byron by using the ottava rima and conversational style of Don Juan in his Letters from Iceland. He was also sorry that T.S.Eliot had damned Byron for his uninteresting mind,36 thus marking his own difference from Eliot

like to see you writing my life if I happen to be a great poet.’” ... Though he was eventually known as the Milton and Goethe of Bengal, his passion for his “‘noble favourite’” Byron was evident ... (Shobhana Bhattacharji, ‘Byron and India,’ paper presented at the 26th International Byron Conference, Nottingham, 2000).

35 Nadeem Aslam, The Wasted Vigil (London: Faber, 2008), p.227. ‘Mazeppa, a piece

more in his earlier style but greatly superior to his earlier work’ (Saintsbury 78). 36 Auden makes another literary connection (among many more). He had wondered

whether he should write to Jane Austen or to Byron. Lady Byron had read Austen, and liked her very much; Jane Austen and at least one of her heroines read Byron (Anne Elliot in Persuasion). But Byron, who was a great reader of popular novels, does not mention Jane Austen, even though his publisher John Murray sent him her novels (see The Letters of John Murray to Lord Byron, ed. By


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and drawing attention to Eliot’s complicated relationship with Byron. We have just enough time for this via a quick look at the modern epic.

Wordsworth’s Prelude and Eliot’s The Waste Land bracket the nineteenth century with hope and despair. For Wordsworth, it was ‘bliss’ to be alive in the early days of the French Revolution. At the other end of the century, Eliot filled his Waste Land with ghosts of all that had died in World War I. The two poets are separated by their attitudes to war and the future, and by the length, allusiveness, and degrees of difficulty of their epics. Byron’s Don Juan and The Waste Land, on the other hand, frame the nineteenth century through their similarity. Both are war epics without being heroic; both poets invented forms to suit their times (as indeed did Wordsworth, but that’s another paper).37 Byron’s epic sprawls, in imitation of the modern world. Inclusive rather than exclusive, everything is a fit subject for his modern epic. He put his technical struggle with his epic inheritance into the poem (see Don Juan, Cantos 1-5).38

Andrew Nicholson). Why should Byron, who wrote to everyone about everything -- so it seems -- not mention Austen, not even to thank Murray for sending her novels? It is one of the mysteries of literary history. But if Byron did not want to be connected with a writer whom his wife liked very much, Auden has no qualms about bracketing him with Jane Austen. Byron and Jane Austen were the only two writers Auden took with him on his trip to Iceland, he says.

37 Byron figured out his relationship with his epic forebears in Don Juan, in which

his twenty-six uses of ‘modern’ to stress the difficulty of writing an epic in an unheroic age. He is always at the point of starting, and may be the only modern writer to begin an epic without a hero. There is at least one ‘modern’ for each Canto of Don Juan, in some he uses it more than once, Canto 9 has none. The canto-wise distribution of extra ‘moderns’ in DJ: 1 (2), 7(2), 11 (2), 13 (3), 15 (2), 16 (2). His muse has neither sting nor sternness. Her ‘worst reproof's a smile; /And then she drops a brief and modern curtsy, / And glides away’ (11.LXII). ‘Oh! would some modern muse inspire,’ Byron had said in Fugitive Pieces (1806), in ‘To a Lady, who Presented the Author a Lock of Hair, Braided with His Own, and Appointed a Night in December, to Meet Him In the Garden.’ He wanted to use epic materials (a hero, an apostrophe, a muse, war) but not creaking supernatural machinery. After a five-Canto battle with the epic tradition, Byron conquered supernatural machinery and high seriousness of tone, and he de-Homered and de-Miltoned the apostrophe into a casual ‘Hail! Muse etc.’ The quickness with which a Google search achieves these results would have convinced even Byron that some supernatural machinery was at work.

38 Matthew Arnold called Don Juan’s discursive style ‘the modern English habit (too

much encouraged by Wordsworth) of using poetry as a channel for thinking aloud instead of making anything’ (quoted in Rutherford, p.199).


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Eliot didn’t do this. It is one difference between him and Byron. A more fundamental difference is this. The Romantics seem modernist and

postmodernist with their fragmentary forms and poems about the forgotten and insignificant, 39 but they were also poets of the sublime, whereas the modernists ‘proper’ didn't do the sublime and the splendid. Unafraid of extravagant emotion, the Romantics sought the sublime and sent it to our modernity through language they created for it — vast open sounds, spacious poems, and an imagination that beckoned beyond it all. Black drizzling crags; boundless, sublime oceans; ‘thoughts that lie too deep for tears.’ The prolix style was part of it.40 Until the late 19th century, a great writer was expected to

39 Especially Wordsworth, and especially in Lyrical Ballads; sometimes Coleridge (This Lime-Tree Bower, My Prison); Shelley, in the minutae of his imagery -- colours and shapes of leaves in their seasons, the tremor of light through waves in Baiae’s Bay; the translucent creatures of Aphrodite’s train; a piny shower through moonlight, the ripple of flowers as the only evidence of a light wind passing over them; the objects in a room (‘Ode to the West Wind,’ Adonais, ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,’ ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’); Keats in his nonsense verse (‘Song about myself’), the tiny sounds of gnats in ‘To Autumn.’

40 T.S.Eliot was distressed by the ‘bulk of Byron’s poetry’ (T.S.Eliot, ‘Byron,’ On

Poetry and Poets (1943; rpt. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2009), pp.223-239, (p.224) But it was during high modernism (1898-1903), that the 13 volume edition of Byron’s works, with many poems and notes published for the first time, edited by R.W.Prothero and E.H.Coleridge, was published. As E.H.Coleridge said in his preface to Volume 1:

Inasmuch as the poems and plays have been before the public for more than three quarters of a century, it has not been thought necessary to burden the notes with the eulogies and apologies of the great poets and critics who were Byron's contemporaries, and regarded his writings, both for good and evil, for praise and blame, from a different standpoint from ours. Perhaps, even yet, the time has not come for a definite and positive appreciation of his genius. The tide of feeling and opinion must ebb and flow many times before his rank and station among the poets of all time will be finally adjudged. The splendour of his reputation, which dazzled his own countrymen, and, for the first time, attracted the attention of a contemporary European audience to an English writer, has faded, and belongs to history; but the poet's work remains, inviting a more intimate and a more extended scrutiny than it has hitherto received in this country. The reader who cares to make himself acquainted with the method of Byron's workmanship, to unravel his allusions, and to follow the tenour of his verse, will, it is hoped, find some assistance in these volumes.


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have an immense output.41 Even in the twentieth century, Byron’s ‘habit of never using one word where three will do,’ was considered an unprecedented ‘distinction,’ along with the ‘fresh range of feelings, [and] new shades of inflexions of the speaking voice [that he introduced] into his poetry.’42 This new, finely discriminated prolixity made Byron a modern of his time.43 Even

41 The Romantics poets were capable of extreme joy (in spite of sundry odes on

Dejection and Melancholy). Even Wordsworth celebrated bliss, joy, glee; he had ‘a convulsive inclination to laughter about his mouth.’ Hazlitt remembered this two decades after visiting the Wordsworths in their home. See Stephen Hebron, William Wordsworth, in The British Library Writers’ Lives (London: The British Library, 2000), p.46. On the link between greatness of a poet and a vast body of work, a great deal has been said. In his 1895 biography of Shelley, J.A.Symonds said that

the greatness of a poet could only be assessed if he leaves us an ample body of work. Shelley has “a much larger body of work that Keats has to his name,” Saintsbury said, which is why he is the greater poet. Because of the variety of his work, critics could predict that had he lived, he would have written better and better poetry, whereas Keats may have merely repeated himself. (Shobhana Bhattacharji, ‘The Prolix Sublime,’ Paul M. Curtis, ed., Des actes sélectionnés du 30e congrés international sur Byron, Byron and the Romantic Sublime, Revue de l'Université de Moncton (Numéro hors série, 2005) (ISSN 0316-6368)). As an aspiring writer, you are brought up on the notion that you have to write several books – offer a substantial body of work – or you are no writer at all. To write just one book and stop with that seems failure of a kind. (Pradeep Sebastian, ‘One-Book Writers,’ Literary Review, The Hindu (Sunday, May 2, 2004), p.6).

42 W.W. Robson, ‘Byron as a poet,’ Critical Essays (London: Routledge and Kegan

Paul, 1966), pp.148-188, 160: ‘he cannot rely on the single word or phrase to carry any potency of charge.’ Byron’s words flowed from him with wit and splendour. Even his unsympathetic wife admitted that he was a monarch of words. When he used a conventional poeticism, its effect was unprecedented, ‘since it moves with [...] more personal rhythms.’ Oddly, in Byron it went along with an extraordinary privacy about his personal life. T.S.Eliot might have admired Byron’s restraint had he been less prolix.

43 Catherine Belsey has written of Modernist Unpleasure; ‘unpleasure’ was Freud’s

word (Catherine Belsey, A Future for Criticism, Wiley, 2011); also at books.google.co.in [23. 5. 2012]. Joy and extravagance meanwhile took to the


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though Four Quartets is not a model of brevity, T.S.Eliot preferred brevity and a dour modernism. Byron is partly responsible for this, for he was Eliot’s strong poet. Eliot’s effort to write unlike Byron eventually became his poetics of Spartan emotion and words.44 The truth is, however, that the modernists had as complicated a relationship with the Romantics as the Romantics had with the Augustans. Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus is beaten up in school for insisting that Byron was a greater poet than Tennyson; and there’s romantic prolixity in Ulysses and Pound’s Cantos. But, as Hobsbawm said, these ‘new revolutionaries’ were a small minority, it was the ‘plebeian arts [that] were about to conquer the world.’45 Which leads nicely to the third and last piece of this mosaic. Popular Culture and Byron Byron inhabits and is claimed by many different kinds of modern modes, among them popular culture. 46 He is the only Romantic whose life was emulated, though the only modernist to match him is probably Hemingway,

movies, Broadway, rock stars, cricket, football, and the Olympic games. For Byron as Eliot’s strong poet, see Alice Levine, ‘T.S.Eliot and Byron,’ ELH 45 (1978), pp. 522-541.

44 Eliot rejected Romantic prolixity, Joyce wrote the massive Ulysses; Like Milton, Byron’s employs allusive meta language in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Don Juan; unlike Wordsworth -- though like Milton or T.S.Eliot -- his verse is not directly autobiographical. Does that make him new and modern? It is not easy to say. Wordsworth, Byron, and Eliot are all radically experimental in their epics, but Wordsworth and Byron are easy to follow, whereas Eliot, like Blake, is often mysterious and opaque. Modern literature likes allusions that cannot easily be found (Eliot, Joyce, Pound) whereas Byron likes them as a common language.

45 E.J.Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire: 1875-1914 (1987; rpt. London: Sphere Books, 1989), p.236.

46 Yeats’ ‘We were the last Romantics’ is often cited as proof of the continuation of

romanticism, but the Great Romantics did not think they were the last of anything. They were ‘modern’ poets. That was their place in the stream of time. Modern is that which originates in the current age, something new (OED), and they saw their times and themselves in terms of a new day, new dawn, an inheritance new fallen, quickening a new birth, spring, and new awakening. However, as the diarist J. Farington said in 1797, ‘fashion may make moderns pass’ (OED).


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recently referred to as ‘Childe Hemingway’ (after Byron’s Childe Harold).47 One of Byron’s explanations for his popularity was that he had done things

other than write. This is an understatement. He died at the age of thirty-six, famous for his involvement in two national liberation movements (Italy, Greece), and as a poet, dramatist, prose writer, Parliamentarian, lover, boxer, swimmer, marksman, horseman, keeper of animals, voracious reader, and traveller.48 His popular afterlives are correspondingly various, the most distinct of which is possibly travelling in his footsteps. Byron believed his Albanian journey was his most unusual, but while nineteenth century travellers had retraced many of his journeys, his Albanian travel had to wait till the 1920s and 1940s to be repeated -- notably by Peter Quennell, Patrick Leigh Fermor and the mountaineer H.W.Tilman, who -- in World War 2 -- equipped himself with Byron’s notes to Childe Harold to guide him through Albania’s terrain and

47 Steven M. Lane, ‘Child Hemingway's Pilgrimage: Byron, Hemingway, and

Authority,’ <http://www.mala.bc.ca/~lanes/english/hemngway/ehbyron.htm>[6. 10. 2006. Server Retired notice on 20. 10. 2011; advised to open Vancouver Island University site, which did not open on 20. 10. 2011]. Lane calls Hemingway ‘paragon of high Modernism.’ He was commenting on Michael S.Reynold’s biography of Hemingway, Hemingway: The 1930s (Norton, 1997).

48 G.Wilson Knight, ‘Byron’s Dramatic Prose,’ Poets of Action (London: Methuen, 1967), pp.266-293:

He died at the age of thirty-six. His poetry, extending to eight hundred double columned pages, shows quality, weight, and substance, enough to constitute the life-work of any major poet. His prose, in historical and literary comment, oratory, letters and journals is in range, variety, and power, among the great achievements of English literature. In politics at home, Byron was an active force, his speeches in the Lords remaining for us a verbal record of his challenge to the ruling classes. Abroad, he engaged in two movements of national liberation, Italian and Greek, leaving his mark as a man of action, on European History and the story of human enlightenment. His reading was, according to Lady Blessington, probably more comprehensive than that of any many of his time. Throughout his life part of every day was regularly give over to physical exercise. There were also certain love-affairs. Some people regard these as a good thing, and some regard them as a bad thing; but on this, at least, we can agree -- they take up time. And yet there has always been talk – he himself started it -- of Byron’s ‘indolence’. If he won time for indolence, that was surely his crowing achievement. (Wilson Knight, p.266).


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culture.49 Reliving Byron’s journeys and swimming the Hellespont are regular features of sports tourism and travel writing now.50

The Romantic and modernist ventures ‘into new and troubling territories of the mind’ having been conquered by ‘the plebian arts,’ Byron is more than ever the subject of films and popular novels.51 He lives most vigorously in popular culture, and this -- I suggest very tentatively -- is where long Romanticism flourishes.

© Shobhana Bhattacharji 23. 5. 2012 New Delhi

Bibliography

Aslam, Nadeem, The Wasted Vigil (London: Faber, 2008) Auden, W.H., ‘Letter to Lord Byron,’ Letters from Iceland (1936) Bhattacharji, Shobhana., ‘“I like the Albanians much:” Byron and three 20th century

49 See Shobhana Bhattacharji, '“I Like the Albanians Much”: Byron and Three Twentieth-Century British Travellers to Albania,’ The Byron Journal, Volume 38, Issue 1(2010), pp.39-48.

50 See Ian Strathcarron, Joy Unconfined: Lord Byron’s Grand Tour Retoured (Signal

Books); and Tessa de Loos, In Byron’s Footsteps (English translation, The Armchair Traveller at the bookHaus, 2011 Tra edition (15 Mar 2011). Charles, the future 14th Lord Byron, swam the Hellespont in 2010. See e.g. <http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/may/06/hellespont-swim-byron>, <http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00s8f1x>, and http://www.newstatesman.com/travel/2007/09/swimming-hellespont-byron

51 The quotations are from Hobsbawm. He did not include the Romantics in his description, but their world had been radically altered, too, and they too ventured into troubling territories of the mind. Here is what Hobsbawm wrote:

[...] for a generation or two after 1875, the world of the triumphant

bourgeoisie appeared to remain firm enough. Perhaps it was a little less self-confident than before, and its assertions of self-confidence therefore a little shriller, perhaps a little more worried about its future. Perhaps it became rather more puzzled by the breakdown of its old intellectual certainties, which (especially after the 1880s) thinkers, artists and scientists underline with their ventures into new and troubling territories of the mind (Age of Capital, p.359).


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British travellers to Albania’ (The Byron Journal Volume 38 No.1 2010), p.39-48 Bottomore, Tom, et al, A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, 2nd edn (1983; rpt. New Delhi:

Maya Blackwell, 1991) Coleridge, S.T., Biographia Literaria (1817) Eliot, T.S., The Waste Land (1922) ---., ‘Byron,’ On Poetry and Poets (1943; rpt. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux,

2009), pp.223-239 Hobsbawm, E.J., The Age of Capital, 1848-1875 (1975; rpt. London: Cardinal, 1991) Levine, Alice, ‘T.S.Eliot and Byron’ (ELH 45 (1978), pp. 522-541) Nicholson, Andrew, ed., The Letters of John Murray to Lord Byron (Liverpool:

Liverpool University Press, 2007) Porter, Roy, The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the British

Enlightenment (New York: Norton, 2000.) Saintsbury, George, A History of Nineteenth Century Literature: 1780-1900 (London:

Macmillan, 1918) Shelley, P.B., A Defense of Poetry (1821) Symonds, John Addington, Shelley (1878; rpt. London: Macmillan, 1937) Wordsworth, William, Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800)


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Biographical Note Shobhana Bhattacharji, M.A., Ph.D., is associate professor at Jesus and Mary College (University of Delhi, India), where she has taught English at all levels since 1970. Deeply interested in British Romanticism, she has a Ph.D. in Byron’s drama and has contributed papers and articles to the International Byron Conferences and The Byron Journal. Her textbooks on the British Romantic poets, Othello, Anglo-American Writing Since the 1930s, and Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park are widely used. Her recent publications include articles on mountain travel writing of the 1930s, children’s literature, North Indian Christianity in the nineteenth century, and teaching English as a second language. She is Member, Advisory Board, International Byron Society; Corresponding member, Byron Society, India Chapter; and on the Academic advisory panel for the 38th International Byron Conference, Lebanon, 2012. She has been Member, Communication Advisory Committee, Christian Medical Association of India, and Associate Fellow, Indian Institute of Advanced Studies (Shimla) from 1997-1998. Publications (Select List) Travel Writing in India., ed. (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2008) Shakespeare’s Othello, annotated, with Intro. (New Delhi: Doaba, 2008) Anglo-American Writing from 1930: A Reader, ed., (New Delhi: Doaba, 2005. 2nd revised

edn. 2006) The Romantics, ed., with introduction and notes, 5th revised edn. (New Delhi: Doaba,

2009) Jane Austen: Mansfield Park, annotations, critical introduction and essays (New Delhi:

Penguin, 2004) Walter Scott: The Heart of Mid-Lothian, annotations, critical introduction and essays (New

Delhi: Penguin, 2009) ‘Teaching, English and Marriage – ingredients for an educational recipe: Interview with

Dr Shobhana Bhattacharji, University of Delhi.’ IATEFL Global Issues Special Interest Group Newsletter, Issue 28 (January 2012), pp. 17-22

‘A Christian Educator in India: Constance Prem Nath Dass (186-1971),’ Christian Medical Journal of India, vols.26:3, and 26:4 & 27:1 (July-September 2011; October 2011-March 2012), pp.34-37, 59-63

‘I Like the Albanians Much': Byron and Three Twentieth-Century British Travellers to Albania,’ The Byron Journal, Volume 38, Issue 1, 2010, pp. 39-48.

‘Naming the Karakoram: The debate of the 1930s,’ Mountains Figured and Disfigured in the English Speaking World (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010).

‘The Gloom and Cheerfulness of Childe Harold and Elizabeth Bennet,’ Byron: Heritage and Legacy, ed. Cheryl Wilson (New York NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) ‘The Prolix Sublime,’ Des actes sélectionnés du 30e congrés international sur Byron, Byron and the Romantic Sublime, ed. Paul M. Curtis (Revue de l'Université de Moncton (Numéro hors série, 2005) (ISSN 0316-6368) ‘“A Certain Portion of Uncertain Paper:” Byron’s Venetian Letters, Nov.1816- Feb.1817,’ The Byron Journal Vol.33 No.2 (2005), pp.109-115 ‘Puzzling `Posterity when our Correspondence bursts forth in the 20th century,”’ Byron

the Traveller: Proceedings of the 28th International Byron, Kyoto, 2002 (Japanese Byron


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Society, 2004), pp.75-85

Modernity in the long Romanticism: The Case of Byron

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