Romance in Byron’s The Island

Abstract

One of the principal impulses of romance is the fulfilment of dream or the portrayal of the world we want to live in as opposed to the one we do live in,¹and one of the principal themes of Byron criticism is that the impulse did not work for Byron. We are familiar with this impulse of romance in such major romantic works as The Prelude and Prometheus Unbound. Wordsworth celebrates in his poem the preservation of the ‘first/Poetic spirit of our human life’ (II. 260–1) which spreads a ‘sentiment of Being … O’er all that moves and all that seemeth still’ (401–2) and creates an image of life ‘All gratulant’ (XIV. 387).²In the preface to Prometheus Unbound, Shelley describes the theme of his poem as ‘beautiful idealisms of moral excellence’.³Neither Wordsworth nor Shelley is naively unaware of the great gulf fixed between the world we want and the world we have, and in the poetry of both there is a strong sense of the strain of bringing the two worlds into any kind of alignment, but there is also, overall, an equally strong sense of the possibility of doing so.

This chapter was originally presented as a lecture to the Byron Society.