The Columbia History of British Poetry (96 page)

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Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

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Page 381
Byron, Shelley, and Keats
Susan M. Levin
Robert Ready
"The web of our Life is of mingled Yarn"
Keats in a letter of 1817 after meeting
Shelley and other writers
Sailing home from a visit with Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned when his schooner, the
Don Juan
, capsized. A volume of Keats's poems found in his pocket helped identify his body. In
Adonais
, his elegy on Keats's own death, Shelley counts himself ("one frail Form, / A phantom among men,") and Byron ("The Pilgrim of Eternity") among those who weep. The three men engaged one another often during their brief lives, as they suggested poetic projects for one another and argued about the methods and materials of poetry.
Keats's plea in his first long poem, "Sleep and Poetry," was not granted"O for ten years, that I may overwhelm / Myself in poesy; so I may do the deed / That my own soul has to itself decreed." But in the seven years he had as a poet, he published forty-five of his one hundred forty-eight poems in three volumes:
Poems
(1817),
Endymion
(1818), and
Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems
(1820). The couplets of "Sleep and Poetry," the myth making of
Endymion
and
Hyperion
, and the narratives of "Isabella" and "The Eve of St. Agnes'' preceded seven remarkable months in the history of English poetryMarch to September 1819when Keats conceived and composed his six major odes: "Ode to Psyche," "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "Ode on Melancholy," "Ode on Indolence," and "To Autumn."
 
Page 382
In a letter of 1821, musing on Shelley's claim that the hostility of reviewers helped put Keats in his grave, Byron recalls his own reaction when the
Edinburgh Review
excoriated his first poems: "It was rage, and resistance, and redressbut not despondency nor despair." Two years after taking revenge for reviews of his
Hours of Idleness
by writing
English Bards and Scotch Reviewers
Byron describes how in 1812 he "awoke one morning and found myself famous" with the publication of Cantos I and II of
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
. His Turkish tales were as popular.
The Corsair
sold ten thousand copies on publication day to a reading public of approximately two hundred twenty thousand.
While visiting Shelley on Lake Geneva, Byron further developed the figure of Childe Harold and the heroes of the tales. Cantos III and IV of
Childe Harold, The Prisoner of Chillon, The Siege of Corinth
, and
Manfred
continue the evolution of the Byronic hero. These cantos of
Childe Harold
also reflect what Byron refers to as Shelley's "dosing" him with Wordsworth "even to nausea." Poetic dramas such as
Marino Faliero, Cain, Sardanapalus, The Two Foscari
, and
Heaven and Earth
raise issues of heroism, politics, and poetry. His some two hundred and fifty poems range in length from four-line epigrams to the more than two thousand stanzas of
Don Juan
. That comic epic portrays the nominal hero in love and war, continuing into seventeen cantos, until Byron's own death in the war between Greece and Turkey.
Shelley received previews of
Don Juan
. A letter of 1821 to his wife, Mary (the author of
Frankenstein
), describes a typical day in Ravenna with Byron. Shelley gets up at noon and writes letters until Byron awakes at two and has breakfast. They talk and read until six when they ride through the pine forests. After dinner at eight, they talk until five or six in the morning. Shelley then writes that Byron "has read to me one of the unpublished cantos of Don Juan, which is astonishingly fine. It sets him not above but far above all the poets of the day: every word is stamped with immortality. I despair of rivalling Lord Byron, as well I may, and there is no other with whom it is worth contending."
Shelley's notion of a group of poets who contend with one another suggests the competitive energies that stimulate them as artists. Shelley's
Julian and Maddalo
(1818) reflects one debate with Byron. Julian, Shelley remarks in the preface to the poem, remains "passionately attached to those philosophical notions which assert the power of man over his own mind," a power that allows "good" to be made superior to
 
Page 383
"the evil in the world." Count Maddalo, on the other hand, asserts, "How vain are such aspiring theories."
From 1813, when he published
Queen Mab
, until 1822, when his work on "The Triumph of Life" was cut short, Shelley remained preoccupied with "such aspiring theories," writing of the possibilities for social and moral reform. The poet, he insists in
A Defence of Poetry
, is the one with power to transform and reform men and women and their institutions. The poet changes man's perception of the real. The reconciliation of ''good and the means of good," as he phrases it in "The Triumph of Life," is a crucial problem addressed in his poetry.
Shelley's early portrayal of the poet in
Alastor
presents a man who refuses any compromise in the reconciliation of vision and reality; he is consumed by his quest. Two other major poems of 1816, "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty' and "Mont Blanc," describe hidden forces of nature and the individual mind's relationship to them. The "Love, Hope, and Self-esteem" brought by visitations of Intellectual Beauty become the forces of political and social revolution in
The Revolt of Islam, Prometheus Unbound
, and
Hellas
. The poet of "Ode to the West Wind," through whose lips trumpets a prophecy of resurrection and regeneration, seeks to sing Eke the lark in "To a Sky-Lark." "The Witch of Atlas" shapes the power of poetic imagination. "The Sensitive-Plant,"
Epipsychidion
, "To Jane," and a number of other lyrics composed in the last two years of his career explore love, morality, and the significance of poetry. In his short life, Shelley wrote some four hundred and fifty poems.
In a letter of 1821 Shelley urged Byron to "subdue yourself to the great task of building up a poem containing within itself the germs of a permanent relation to the present, and to all succeeding ages!" This exhortation precedes by a month Shelley's critical insight, in his
Defence
, that persons and ages create ever "new relations" with great poetry.
The energy and beauty of his powers seem to dispersethe narrow and wretched taste in which (most unfortunately for the real beauty which they hide) he has clothed his writings.
Shelley, writing of Keats's
Hyperion
, in a letter of 1821 to Byron.
Byron, Shelley, and Keats were historically conscious writers aware of the cultural debates that mold literary traditions. The issue of "taste" becomes paramount as they debate exactly whose literature they should link themselves to. In writing to Byron about Keats, Shelley observes how significant the figure of Alexander Pope has become: "Pope, it
 
Page 384
seems, has been selected as the pivot of a dispute in taste. . . ." Byron solidified the grounds for this debate when he responded, in a pamphlet, to attacks on Pope initiated in
Strictures on the Life and Writings of Pope
by the poet and critic Reverend William Lisle Bowles. "Indeed," Byron wrote in a letter of 1821, "1 look upon a proper appreciation of Pope as a touchstone of taste."
For Byron, Pope is like the Parthenon, fixed against the failure of contemporary writing to show quality or of criticism to occupy the "Throne of Taste." "Ode! Epic! Elegy!have at you all!" Jeering at the indiscriminate English bards on the scene in 1808the laureate Pye, Southey, Wordsworth, Bowles, Coleridge, and Scottin
English Bards and Scotch Reviewers
, Byron satirizes the degeneration of English poetry. "Scotch'' reviewers, especially Francis Jeffrey and George Lamb of the powerful
Edinburgh Review
, help shape the sad literary scene in which "MILTON, DRYDEN, POPE, alike forgot, / Resign their hallow'd Bays to WALTER SCOTT."
The people no longer rise with the poet, who is now rapt only by himself rather than being the voice of a whole "polished" nation. "Time was," Byron's critical myth continues, when poetry allied sense and wit, when an "English audience felt" nature in common. Now Wordsworth is his own hero, and Coleridge is "tumid" and obscure. To work with common language and subjects, to demonstrate, as Wordsworth phrases it in the Preface to the second edition of
Lyrical Ballads
, that there can be no "
essential
difference between the language of prose and metrical composition," is an unacceptable poetic enterprise. As he tells "the tale of Betty Foy, / The idiot mother of an 'idiot Boy'," Wordsworth participates in the degeneration of English verse, and becomes a bard "Who, both by precept and example, shows / That prose is verse, and verse is merely prose. . . ."
In later apologizing to Coleridge for these charges, Byron regretted the "generality" that blunted his young attempt at older satire. But a specific Byronic interest remains in the poemits mix of personal display with nostalgia for a unified reason and taste, just before the poet's own epochal trip in 1809 to "classic lands." When it is most unlike Pope, as when Byron worries the connection of the public weal to his own passion and pleasure,
English Bards
signals Byron's writing to come, which will mix conflicted self and society in ways that really "have at" received modes.

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