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)

9781009232937, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 10 July 2025

228 pages
27 x 18 x 1.5 cm, 0.247 kg

'McGann's writing style is accessible, direct, modern - and provides a doubly pointed contrast to the didactic denigration of Byron in the early twentieth-century readings he challenges. I also want to take a moment to consider the physical form of this book because the engaging accessibility of McGann's authorial voice is reflected in the size of Poetics of Adversity which is, itself, a 'little book.' Unusually small for a scholarly monograph, it is easy to carry in a pocket, easy to read one-handed, and its physical form not only recalls Byron's tongue-in-cheek description of 'Don Juan' (itself a parodical jibe at Robert Southey's smug satisfaction with Carmen Nuptiale), but also facilitates the pleasurable act of reading Byron and reading about Byron (my first reading was standing in a swimming pool, pencil in hand).' Emily Paterson-Morgan, European Romantic Review

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]