Byronic Confession

Abstract

M. H. Abrams long ago identified an important connection between Augustinian ‘crisis-autobiography’ and certain forms of writing in the English Romantic period, particularly the poetry of Wordsworth. One may think, for example, of The Prelude as both confessional and autobiographical, a one-man epic about the growth of a poet’s mind and his attempt to sacralise his imagination. Abrams was wise to observe a profound difference, however, between St Augustine’s wholly theodicial autobiography and the ’secular theodicy’ of Wordsworth’s masterpiece, where the poet presents ‘a theodicy without an operative theos — which retains the form of the ancient reasoning, but translates controlling Providence into an immanent teleology’.¹ The complete omission of Byron from Abrams’s Natural Supernaturalism (1971) suggests that his style of confessional biography is at further variance from the traditional models that partly inspired Wordsworth. The confessional, immanently teleological plot of Wordsworth’s epic bears very little resemblance to the theatricality, materiality, and duplicity one sees in Byron’s confessional writings.