17 - George Gordon, Lord Byron

Summary

In 1937, T. S. Eliot published an essay on Byron (later reprinted in his collection On Poetry and Poets, 1957) in which he asserted that of all the Romantic period poets, Byron ‘would seem the most nearly remote from the sympathies of every living critic’. That was scarcely true in 1937 – W. H. Auden, for instance, had composed his long ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ in 1936 – and it was even less true twenty years later. Byron, however, was certainly remote from Eliot’s own sympathies and not just because he felt there were unthinking schoolboy enthusiasms to interrogate and overcome, or even because he deplored the lack of concentration in Byron’s verse, and its sheer volume by comparison with what he judged to be its overall quality. In the two essays on Milton also reprinted in On Poetry and Poets, Eliot found much to cavil at too when considering the author of Paradise Lost. But he was clear that (despite the damage supposedly done by Milton to the English language, compounded by a deficiency of visual perception by no means attributable merely to his literal blindness) ‘it must be admitted that Milton was a very great poet’, even though Eliot thought him ‘antipathetic’ not only as a thinker but simply as a man, when judged ‘by the ordinary standards of likeableness in human beings’.

Eliot never admitted that Byron was a great poet, although he did concede that, partly because of his gift for digression, and the ‘torrential fluency’ of his verse, he is never monotonous or dull. (He failed to mention that Byron can also be gloriously funny.)