Gilbert White – famed naturalist, clergyman, and sometime-poet – played with the relationship between echoes and poetry in surprising ways in his Natural History of Selborne (1789). White used Latin poetry as an instrument to measure echoes, and he played around with English prosodic ideas about ‘sound echoing’ sense. This chapter’s reading of White’s echo play highlights the ways in which assumptions baked into our category of ‘poetry’ – that it isn’t science, that it is an unlikely instrument for measurements, that it has something to do with expressive subjectivity, that in English it involves feet and substitutions – can obscure what and how people heard in the past. We should be wary of using understandings of lyric forged by Romantic poets and anachronistically instituted as central to all poetry to make sense of how and why someone like White engaged it. We should be wary of assuming even something as basic as how many syllables people of the past heard in particular lines.

‘I have always sought to stand by myself’ Arnold announced in 1865.1 The remark is the more intriguing for its appearance in the first series of Essays in Criticism, a collection which, with its consideration of cultural tradition and the intricate relationality of writers, both affirms and denies autonomy. A poet-critic deeply interested in the legacy of the past and the influence of previous generations of writers, Arnold was very conscious of the particular challenges of pursuing a literary voice of one’s own in an age when the place and purpose of the arts was being questioned (not least by him), and with the Romantics still in living memory. The irony of Arnold’s wish ‘to stand by myself’ is that its registering of distinctness carries Byronic airs. With one eye on his present fame and one on posterity Byron had declared ‘I stood and stand alone’, sounding more sure of it than Arnold.2 Whether it was his powerful individualism and desire to go his own way, his defence of personal liberties and resistance to authority, or his estranged and egoistic heroes, Byron was the embodiment of self-determination for contemporaries and subsequent generations. Arnold admired Byron’s independent streak, and, ironically, found in it means of self-recognition as well as self-evaluation with which to carve out his own career. He sets up Byron as an example of what he wanted to be, as well as – more negatively – what he was prone to being, what he could not quite manage to live up to, or wanted to avoid becoming. Regard for Byron also enabled him to evaluate the legacy of different strands of English Romanticism and put his finger on what he felt was lacking in Victorian life and culture.

The polarisation of Byron and Wordsworth takes on a cartoonish tinge in the light of their poetic enmity. Byron’s bombastic lines, ‘Thou shalt believe in Milton, Dryden, Pope; / Thou shalt not set up Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey’, claim to reject Wordsworth’s circle in favour of an earlier triumvirate.1 Readers are, only half-mockingly, asked to choose between one school and another. This stark choice often sets the tone for critical debates.2 Yet the gulf between Byron and Wordsworth, as Jane Stabler and Philip Shaw have shown, is less wide than either poet cared to admit.3 Wordsworth and Byron converge upon and diverge from markedly similar points. The epic genre, Milton and his influence, and the shaping of poetic tastes become key areas of dispute for both poets. Both claim Milton in particular for very different reasons. Milton, for Byron, is an ethical and political figure used to sponsor his own self-image, where Wordsworth’s ‘reverence for his great original’ colours both his blank verse epic and his introspective mode.4 Despite their significant similarities, however, the sense remains that the two poets set themselves up in opposition to one another, shaping and defining themselves oppositionally in their political allegiances and formal choices. While Byron dealt in public sallies against Wordsworth and the Lake School, Wordsworth’s animus against the younger poet led him to participate in and encourage what Jerome McGann has called a ‘campaign of vilification’ against Byron.5 Poetic enmity proved to be a more potent and vital form of influence than alliance as Byron and Wordsworth fought to set the taste of a nation.

‘Lord Byron is altogether in my affection again’, Robert Browning wrote to Elizabeth Barrett a few weeks before their elopement in 1846. During their courtship, Browning revised the more critical opinion of Byron which had followed his youthful discipleship, and was eager to show that he shared Elizabeth’s enthusiasm.

W. H. Auden made it clear in his ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ and various prose writings on Byron that what counted for him was the poet’s ‘voice’: ‘I like your muse because she’s gay and witty / […] / I like her voice that does not make me jump’.1 ‘Voice’ was no small matter for Auden, since as he famously declared in ‘September 1, 1939’ it was all he had ‘[t]o undo the folded lie’.2 Addressing Byron in the form of a verse-letter allowed him to find a new voice for himself. Within the context of Letters from Iceland, the format permitted him to talk on public matters while adopting the tone of a private communication; and, in addition, it allowed him to develop a broader conception of poetry’s scope, by finding in it a place for the non-earnest – something, as he saw it, that had been lost along the way in the development of poetry since Byron’s time. It gave a new direction to his own writing, preparing the way for the longer poems of the second half of his career.

In a marginal note of 1807, Coleridge writes: ‘who shall dare say of yon river, such & such a wave came from such a fountain? What Scholar […] shall say—Such a conviction, such a moral feeling, I received from St John/ such & such from Seneca, or Epictetus?’1 An essay of the kind presented here – which pursues how elements of form and style in Byron’s verse manifest in British poetry since the 1940s – contends with a similar issue. Cultural currents flow mixedly in poetry, and to discover a ‘Byronic’ characteristic in modern verse may not be to prove direct readerly influence. That is why, in part, I refer to inflection – which preserves a certain agnosticism – as the more accommodating term for the Byronic traces I have recognised: those observable variations in the practice of poetry that, however obliquely, respond in some way to Byron’s own. That response may involve a deliberate engagement with Byron’s work (and often does), but it may also be more implicit: a response to the less obvious but nonetheless palpable effects that Byron’s poetry has had on the possibilities of language and poetry, as they have been perceived since the mid-twentieth century. These inflections reveal the latent presence of Byron’s poetics the way iron filings reveal the presence of a magnetic field.

At first glance, Byron and Keats make an unlikely pair. Keats dismissed Byron as being merely interested in cutting a figure and pinned his literary success to the advantages of being six feet tall and a lord, while Byron disdained ‘that little dirty blackguard KEATES’ and snobbishly suggested he was spoiled by ‘Cockneyfying & Suburbing’ (BLJ, VII. 229; VIII. 102). The one was a middle-class poet who died young with little fanfare and a relatively slim output of published work. The other was a nobleman, a world-famous celebrity, with a prolific output of bestselling poems. But what might we learn about each poet by thinking about them together? And what might their pairing tell us about Romanticism more broadly?