This essay is concerned with the history of reading Byron’s poetry in the classroom, particularly which of his poems, and in what form (whole or excerpted), have come to constitute his legacy. The essay begins by considering the critical situation historical poetry faces in the modern classroom, before tracing the history of teaching Byron through selections in the nineteenth and twentieth century, and concluding with a proposal for a different way to present Byron’s poetry, one that is sensitive to both pedagogical heritage and the changing state of university education. My argument traces two complex phenomena at play in the modern classroom: first, the changing abilities of, and expectations on, students to read long poems; and second, historical and contradictory impulses at work in the teaching of poetry and its materials, revolving around nebulous ideas concerning whole texts and the lyric.
This article explores Franz Liszt’s Years of Pilgrimage , I: Switzerland as a musical engagement with Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage . It formulates the argument that the piano set reimagines Byron’s philosophical and formal structures rather than merely evoking Alpine scenery. Drawing on melopoetics, musical semiotics, and contextual analysis, the study shows how Liszt transmutes stanzaic rhythm, rhetorical devices, and Byronic tone into musical analogues. Close readings of ‘At Lake Wallenstadt’, ‘Eclogue’, and ‘The Bells of G[eneva]’ demonstrate how water imagery, pastoral allusion, and bell symbolism enact Byron’s meditations on identity, transcendence, and peace. The article emphasises how musical structures participate in contemporaneous expressive and cultural affordances, emerging as a Byronic pilgrimage.
This essay considers Byron as a cosmological poet, as a writer, that is, who draws the ideas and images of astronomy into his work. The first part of the essay explores Byron’s continuation of the Miltonic tradition of cosmological poetry, primarily with reference to Cain . It discovers a double impulse. On one hand, Byron modernises Milton for a decided Copernican age and amplifies the existential threat implied by the realisation of unstructured and infinite outer space. On the other, he disrupts the narrative of scientific history by using (anachronistic) Ptolemaic imagery in order to create unique configurations of poetic thought and feeling. The second part of the essay seeks to understand these findings by placing Byron’s cosmological poetry more securely in the scientific and poetic contexts of his day.
Byron wrote a number of tragic plays, but he wished them to be read rather than performed in the theatre. Placing Byron’s preference for closet tragedy in the context of contemporary connotations of theatregoing and the reading of drama, this article explores, first, what Byron’s desire for tragedy in what he referred to as the ‘Mental Theatre’ tells us about his conception of tragedy. It argues that Byron’s preference for reading suggests that he views tragedy as deeply private and individual, and then traces how the relationship between the reader and text unfolds in Manfred (1817). Described by Byron as ‘the very Antipodes of the stage and […] meant to be so’, Manfred further complicates Byron’s notion of tragedy as the reading experience reminds the reader of not just the expansiveness of our imagination and selfhood, but also of their limits.
