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.