Chapter 15 - Byron and the Eighteenth Century

Summary

This chapter argues that Byron is famous as a leading figure in Romantic poetry, but his own allegiance was to eighteenth-century culture. I argue that on the one hand he confirms the distinction between the two and yet he also overturns it. This is because he enters so deeply into the contradictions and character of eighteenth-century culture that he is part of their generation of something different. In this he resembles Burke’s deep relation to Whig culture and Newman’s to the Church of England, both of whom by this brought about the transformation of what they revered into something new and yet sourced in the past. I argue that is bound up with a larger historical transition between judging actions as open possibilities and accepting behaviour as an unalterable given. Byron is, as he claimed to be, an ethical poet because his attention is primarily to the former of these.