Byron and the Poetics of Adversity

Upending traditional Byron criticism to reveal a more relentlessly precise and skeptical poetic mind than ever previously thought, Jerome McGann offers numerous close readings of Byron's verse alongside that of his contemporaries to show how he challenged the limits of poetry and exposed the illusions and contradictions of his age.

"A long line of traditional, often conservative, criticism and cultural commentary deplored Byron as a slipshod poet. This pithy yet aptly poetic book, written by one of the world''s foremost Romantic scholars, argues that assessment is badly mistaken. Byron''s great subject is what he called "Cant": the habit of abusing the world through misusing language. Setting up his poetry as a laboratory to investigate failures of writing, reading, and thinking, Byron delivered sharp critical judgment on the costs exacted by a careless approach to his Mother Tongue. Perspicuous readings of Byron alongside some of his Romantic contemporaries - Burns, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley - reveal Byron''s startling reconfiguration of poetry as a "broken mirror" and shattered lamp. The paradoxical result was to argue that his age''s contradictions, and his own, offered both ethical opportunities and a promise of poetic - broadly cultural - emancipation. This book represents a major contribution to ideas about Romanticism"--