Byronic Anger and the Victorians

Abstract

At every stage of his career, from English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809) and The Curse of Minerva (1811) to Marino Faliero (1820) and Cain (1821), Byron was writing poetry occasioned and shaped by anger. He characteristically combines satiric impulses with a dramatic sense of himself as a figure of vengeance, producing a generic red-shift. For Byron, the resulting angry poetry—a combination of satire, dramatic curse, and confessional lyric—opposes Romantic sincerity with its theatricality, Romantic sympathy with its alienating effects, and Romantic transcendence with its commitment to mundane cycles of retribution. All of this helped make his legacy a particularly vexed one for the poets that followed. The Victorian reception of Byronism is frequently characterized by moments of staged rejection; in Byron and the Victorians, Andrew Elfenbein has shown the extent to which a number of Victorian authors defined themselves as evolving past Byronic immaturity. A renewed focus on the anger of Byron’s poetry helps us see the political and aesthetic implications of this process with more clarity.