Spain and Byron’s The Age of Bronze (1823)

Abstract

A young George Gordon Byron visited Spain in 1809 and gave a romanticized version of his impressions in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto I (1812). In this poem, aversion to Wellington paradoxically combined with support for the Spanish patriots who were fighting for independence. A decade later, Wellington was the British representative at the Congress of Verona , and the Spaniards were facing yet another French intervention. Byron, who had called Ferdinand VII ‘a fool’ and ‘a bigot’ as early as 1812, hailed the 1820 Spanish liberal revolution in his letters from Italy and lucidly saw the ‘Spanish business’, as he called it, as having sparked off other revolutions in southern Europe. With the Neapolitan uprising already crushed by an Austrian army, and the Holy Alliance ready to wipe out the Spanish constitutional régime by military action, Byron embarked upon a politically engaged poetical response to this state of affairs. The result was The Age of Bronze—a complex poem, teeming with allusion, referred to by its author as ‘being all on politics’, and largely ignored by modern criticism. The Age of Bronze displays a wealth of Spanish allusion and, significantly, Byron refers to Spain with exactly the same adjectives— ‘renowned, romantic’—that he had used in Childe Harold, and again views the Spaniards as freedom fighters. As this essay explains, the numerous allusions in the poem to the country and its American colonies (which were then in the process of emancipation) can only be understood in the light of its author’s alertness to contemporary events, among which revolutionary Spain was once again paramount. Working from its first MS draft (at the Bodleian Library) has contributed further insights into this complex poem.