Introduction
Lord Byron belongs to a romantic movement that emerged as a reaction against scientific discoveries. The romantic poets challenged rationality as the intellectual outlook of the Age of Reason. In the early Victorian period, rationalism acquired new values and practical influence, under the auspices of Byron (Abrams 33). Lord Byron, regarded today as well as in his own time as the greatest Victorian poet, was an enlightened rationalist.
In such respects, the Victorian mind had its roots deep in eighteenth-century, not romantic, soil. In that same soil had also been fed the familiar cluster of restrictive social values and practices attributed to the Victorians—unfairly, insofar as it is assumed that they originated them.
Lord Byron and Victorianism
Victorianism, in general, existed in the court of George III, which was notorious among the freer spirits of the late eighteenth century for its oppressive virtue and sheer dullness. Thus, Lord Byron was involved in political struggle and considered one of the revolutionists of his time. His revolutionary fervor discomfited a national spirit dominated by middle-class insistence upon cautious, slow reform if reform was conceded to be necessary at all (Benton and DiYanni 445).
His preoccupation with political ideas and his extravagant rhetoric did not appeal to the literary taste which had turned in the direction of Wordsworth and, among the percipient, toward Alfred Tennyson after his Poems of 1842. Byron’s personality and career were alien to a moral climate in which rectitude, chastity, and seriousness had replaced sexual attitudes (Stabler 84). In spirit Passed before Me, Byron writes:
A spirit passed before me: I beheld
The face of immortality unveiled –
Deep sleep came down on every eye save mine –
And there it stood, -all formless -but divine (Byron 43).
Byron’s attacks on the political establishment in Don Juan, A Vision of Judgement, and elsewhere, available only in underground editions because of government prosecutions, were veritable Holy Writ among the discontented workers, and their sentiments helped inflame popular radicalism between the 1820s and the I840’s (Stabler 66). In early Victorian society at large, romantic emotionalism manifested itself in numerous ways—in the rhetoric of politicians in Parliament and of Nonconformist preachers and hymn writers; in the oratory of radical agitators; in some painters’ obsession with apocalyptic subjects; in the sentimentality which governed domestic relations, the conduct of courtship, the veneration of the fireside; in the unapologetic tears shed by stalwart men (Stabler 64).
Romantic generation
The younger romantic generation, Byron, whose celebrity during his lifetime had outshone that of all the others put together, remained in the public eye for a decade after his death in 1824 because of his surviving friends’ acrimonious squabbling over issues connected with the writing of his biography (Stabler 39). The popularity of his poems was assisted for some years by the heroic circumstances of his death. Byron died of malaria in Greece while preparing to assist in the Greek war of independence against the Turks. There were several reasons for the Byronic decline in the Victorian period. There was one group, however, to whom Byron remained an idol. These were the radical workingmen, whose enthusiasm was ideological rather than aesthetic in origin (Mcgann and Soderholm 51).
Byron marked a new era in poetry characterized by deep feelings and emotions, love relations, and great passion. The free venting of the feelings became so desirable a habit of life that people deliberately sought stimuli in the arts, including poetry and fiction, and attached incommensurate importance to ordinary occurrences for the sake of additional opportunities to rejoice or grieve. In solitude, Byron writes:
And roam alone the world’s tired denizen,
With none who bless us, none whom we can bless;
Minions of splendor shrinking from distress! (Byron 43).
The trappings of woe with which the Victorians surrounded the death of a dear one rank high among the peculiar wonders of popular culture. It was at least partially responsible for the decline in subjectivity that characterized Victorian poetic theory and practice. Whatever else was required of Byronic poetry, it had to be faithful to familiar human experience (Mcgann and Soderholm 65). In Byron, this was a basic principle: tired stereotypes and conventions and speak the language of fresh, everyday observation and experience, which is the indispensable bond of communication between poet and audience.
This is the idea in Byron’s poems, especially Hours Of Idleness, The Corsair, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Every major poet repeatedly drew his subjects from faraway times and places, most notably but by no means exclusively the age of classical antiquity and the Middle Ages. But, to a greater extent than the romantics, Byron tended to choose his historical and exotic themes with an eye to their present-day relevance (Enscoe and Gleckner 29).
Summary
In sum, as a romantic poet, Byron’s unrestrained expression of the self and passion in literature, although popular taste remained responsive to it. One reason was that with the romantics, critics felt, subjectivism had been carried to an “unhealthy” extreme and a reaction was bound to set in. Another reason was the growing influence of the scientific-rationalistic spirit, which devalued the importance of individual perceptions.
References
- Abrams M. H. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. New York: Oxford UP, 1971.
- Benton, J. R., DiYanni, R. Intro to Humanities: Arts and Culture. Vol. 2. Prentice Hall; 2005.
- Byron’s Poetry: Norton Critical Edition. Edit. By Frank D. McConnell. W. W. Norton & Company, 1980.
- Enscoe E. Gerald, Gleckner, Robert F. Romanticism: Points of View. Prentice Hall, 1962.
- Mcgann, J. Soderholm, J. Byron and Romanticism. Cambridge University Press, 2002.
- Stabler, J. Byron, Poetics and History. Cambridge University Press, 2002.