Byron and the Poetics of Adversity

A landmark study that unearths Byron's profound, enduring critique of the failures of language and the contradictions of his age.

Jerome McGann (Author)

9781009232951, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 15 December 2022

226 pages
19.4 x 12.9 x 1.8 cm, 0.3 kg

'McGann's style is vivid and animated, exuberant even … [he] makes the reader feel, while immersed, that nothing could be more important than the task in hand … he writes not only to evoke poetic excellences, but also to make a timely intervention … You may not always agree with his diagnosis of what needs to be done, but you never end a piece by McGann without feeling that you've been put through your paces and are better for it.' Seamus Perry, Times Literary Supplement

A long line of traditional, often conservative, criticism and cultural commentary deplored Byron as a slipshod poet. This pithy yet aptly poetic book, written by one of the world's foremost Romantic scholars, argues that assessment is badly mistaken. Byron's great subject is what he called 'Cant': the habit of abusing the world through misusing language. Setting up his poetry as a laboratory to investigate failures of writing, reading, and thinking, Byron delivered sharp critical judgment on the costs exacted by a careless approach to his Mother Tongue. Perspicuous readings of Byron alongside some of his Romantic contemporaries – Burns, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley – reveal Byron's startling reconfiguration of poetry as a 'broken mirror' and shattered lamp. The paradoxical result was to argue that his age's contradictions, and his own, offered both ethical opportunities and a promise of poetic – broadly cultural – emancipation. This book represents a major contribution to ideas about Romanticism.

1. Don Juan and the English language
2. Byron Agonistes, 1809–1816
3. Manfred: one word for mercy
4. Byron and the 'Wrong Revolutionary Poetical System'
5. Byron, Blake, and the adversity of poetics
6. The stubborn foe: bad verse and the poetry of action.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD], Poetry by individual poets [DCF]