Book contents
- Reviews
- Byron and the Poetics of Adversity
- Byron and the Poetics of Adversity
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Don Juan and the English Language
- 2 Byron Agonistes, 1809–1816
- 3 Manfred
- 4 Byron and the “Wrong Revolutionary Poetical System”
- 5 Byron, Blake, and the Adversity of Poetics
- 6 The Stubborn Foe
- Notes
- Index
2 - Byron Agonistes, 1809–1816
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 November 2022
- Reviews
- Byron and the Poetics of Adversity
- Byron and the Poetics of Adversity
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Don Juan and the English Language
- 2 Byron Agonistes, 1809–1816
- 3 Manfred
- 4 Byron and the “Wrong Revolutionary Poetical System”
- 5 Byron, Blake, and the Adversity of Poetics
- 6 The Stubborn Foe
- Notes
- Index
Summary
From 1809 to 1816 Byron used his own life experiences, not least their failures and spectacular self-deceptions, to draw up an insidious contract with a readership of secret sharers. Byron learned from Pope how to fashion an array of disturbing verse practices – implicitly addressed to a social order of “The mad, the bad, the useless, and the base” – that called readers to demanding acts of attention and self-attention. The poetry of 1809–1816 unfolds a wide range of “perversifications” to expose the airbrushed language of a canting world, with The Siege of Corinth being the culminating poetic act of dark revelation.
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- Byron and the Poetics of Adversity , pp. 38 - 81Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022