The Poet-Hero in the Work of Byron and Shelley

By Madeleine Callaghan

Byron’s and Shelley’s experimentation with the possibilities and pitfalls of poetic heroism unites their work. The Poet-Hero in the Work of Byron and Shelley traces the evolution of the poet-hero in the work of both poets, revealing that the struggle to find words adequate to the poet’s imaginative vision and historical circumstance is their central poetic achievement. Madeleine Callaghan explores the different types of poetic heroism that evolve in Byron’s and Shelley’s poetry and drama. Both poets experiment with, challenge and embrace a variety of poetic forms and genres, and this book discusses such generic exploration in the light of their developing versions of the poet-hero. The heroism of the poet, as an idea, an ideal and an illusion, undergoes many different incarnations and definitions as both poets shape distinctive and changing conceptions of the hero throughout their careers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Feb 28, 2019
• ISBN: 9781783088997

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The Poet-Hero in the Work of Byron and Shelley

Anthem Nineteenth-Century Series

The Anthem Nineteenth-Century Series incorporates a broad range of titles within the fields of literature and culture, comprising an excellent collection of interdisciplinary academic texts. The series aims to promote the most challenging and original work being undertaken in the field and encourages an approach that fosters connections between areas including history, science, religion and literary theory. Our titles have earned an excellent reputation for the originality and rigour of their scholarship and our commitment to high-quality production.

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Editorial Board

Dinah Birch – University of Liverpool, UK

Kirstie Blair – University of Stirling, UK

Archie Burnett – Boston University, USA

Christopher Decker – University of Nevada, USA

Heather Glen – University of Cambridge, UK

Linda K. Hughes – Texas Christian University, USA

Simon J. James – Durham University, UK

Angela Leighton – University of Cambridge, UK

Jo McDonagh – King’s College London, UK

Michael O’Neill – Durham University, UK

Seamus Perry – University of Oxford, UK

Clare Pettitt – King’s College London, UK

Adrian Poole – University of Cambridge, UK

Jan-Melissa Schramm – University of Cambridge, UK

The Poet-Hero in the Work of Byron and Shelley

Madeleine Callaghan

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

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This edition first published in UK and USA 2019

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Copyright © Madeleine Callaghan 2019

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-897-3 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78308-897-4 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

For Michael O’Neill (1953–2018)

Art and eloquence,

And all the shows o’ the world are frail and vain

To weep a loss that turns their lights to shade

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Note on Texts and Abbreviations

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am very grateful to a number of people for their encouragement, help and stimulating conversations, especially Joe Bray, Fabienne Collignon, Stuart Curran, Amanda Davis, Katherine Ebury, Jonathan Ellis, Gavin Hopps, Anthony Howe, Ágnes Lehóczky, Mariyah Mandhu, Chris Murray, Ellen Nicholls, Paul O’Neill, Seamus Perry, Adam Piette, Amber Regis, Nicholas Roe, Mark Sandy, Ranjan Sen, Jane Stabler, Emma Suret, Philip Swanson, Paige Tovey Jones, Sue Vice, Daniel Westwood, Sarah Wootton and Angela Wright. I am grateful to my colleagues and the University of Sheffield for their support of my research. Thanks also to Anthem Press.

For permission to reprint published material in this book I am grateful to the following relevant editors and publishers: Keats-Shelley Review 24 and Byron Journal 38.2. I’d like to thank both my father and my brother, Martin and Richard Callaghan, for their interest in my work; Stuart Green for his love and understanding; and, finally, the late Michael O’Neill for reading and commenting on every word of this book, and for being such a witty, generous and brilliant poet, critic and friend. You are much missed.

NOTE ON TEXTS AND ABBREVIATIONS

Lord George Gordon Byron, Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 13 vols (London: Murray, 1973–94). Hereafter BLJ.

All quotations from Byron’s letters will be taken from this edition.

Lord Byron: The Complete Miscellaneous Prose, ed. Andrew Nicholson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). Hereafter Byron’s Prose.

All quotations from Byron’s prose will be taken from this edition.

Lord George Gordon Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann and Barry Weller, 7 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–93). Hereafter CPW.

All quotations from Byron’s poetry and drama (unless specified otherwise) will be taken from this edition.

Lord George Gordon Byron, Lord Byron: The Major Works, ed., intro. and notes Jerome McGann, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000). Hereafter McGann.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. F. L. Jones, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964). Hereafter Letters: PBS.

All quotations from Shelley’s letters (unless specified otherwise) will be taken from this edition.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Major Works, ed., intro. and notes Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Hereafter Major Works.

All quotations from Shelley’s poetry, prose and drama (unless specified otherwise) will be taken from this edition.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Donald Reiman, Neil Fraistat and Nora Crook, 3 vols to date (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000–). Hereafter CPPBS.

All quotations from Laon and Cythna; or the Revolution of the Golden City: A Vision of the Nineteenth Century in the Stanza of Spenser will be taken from this edition (vol. 3; pub. 2012).

Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

The Holy Bible: Authorized King James Version (London: The British and Foreign Bible Society, 1957).

All quotations from the Bible will be from this edition.

INTRODUCTION

THE POET-HERO: ‘WHO SHALL TRACE THE VOID?’

The arresting sally that begins Don Juan sees Byron’s narrator insist on the hero as the centre and circumference of his self-proclaimed epic:

I want a hero: an uncommon want,

When every year and month sends forth a new one,

Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant,

The age discovers he is not the true one;

Of such as these I should not care to vaunt,

I’ll therefore take our ancient friend Don Juan,

We all have seen him in the pantomime

Sent to the devil, somewhat ere his time.

(Don Juan I. 1: 1–8)

With a flourish, Byron’s narrator foregrounds two meanings of ‘want’. He immediately asserts himself as a narrator intent on holding the reader’s attention with his verbal virtuosity, even to the extent of excluding the hero he claims to want. Rather than seeming secondary and passive, he is the active figure, the shaping power and the central character of Don Juan. Byron leaves the reader with the impression that the narrator could have chosen another hero and, more importantly, he establishes that the hero needs the narrator. The balance of power is shifting but undecided: the narrator’s expressive power eclipses the hero, yet the narrator requires a hero for his epic. The narrator’s dominance over his hero remains incomplete. Placing hero and narrator alongside one another, Byron draws the reader’s attention to the symbiosis between them: word and deed vie for dominance in the work as the relationship between poet and hero becomes the animating force of Don Juan.

Shelley is equally compelled by the relationship between poet and hero, bringing the two figures together in his poetry and drama. He expands Wordsworth’s sense that the poet is ‘endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind’ to still greater heights by underscoring the responsibility of the poet to be both legislator and prophet in his Defence of Poetry,¹ where word must struggle to achieve the status of deed in his poetry. For Shelley, as for Byron, the poet-hero remains an exhilarating and perilous challenge as both poets experiment with versions of the poet as hero. The creation of the poet-hero sees Byron and Shelley shift the terms of heroism from the muscular version of epic heroism, where to be a hero is to be famed for heroic deeds, to the realm of the poetic, where heroic power is sought and won through language. Their specific ‘craving for the heroic’ sees heroism move from the active to the verbal sphere.² Seeking to define and redefine the meaning of the poetic heroism, Byron and Shelley assess and assert poetry’s claim to power, testing the poet’s fitness for the title of poet-hero.

Thomas Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History argued that ‘Society is founded on Hero-worship’,³ and compounded the significance of the hero to argue for the poet as a hero in his 1840 lecture on the topic.⁴ Following Shelley, he extended the poet’s powers to argue that ‘the Politician, the Thinker, Legislator, Philosopher; in one or the other degree, he could have been, he is all these’,⁵ even crowning Napoleon with the poet’s laurels. Viewing ‘sincerity’ and ‘intensity’ as the key virtues of the poet-hero, Carlyle valorized the poet for his language as reflecting his inner abilities: ‘The Poet who could merely sit on a chair, and compose stanzas, would never make a stanza worth much. He could not sing the Heroic warrior, unless he himself were at least a Heroic warrior too.’⁶ But his predecessors anticipate his arguments, and while embracing Carlyle’s elucidation of the poet’s intensity, they evince less confidence in his conclusion that the poet-hero ‘is one; and preaches the same Self abroad in all these ways’.⁷ Byron and Shelley force such conviction in the hero as poet under serious scrutiny, first, as an unmitigated good, and second, as a possibility that can be achieved by the poet. Byron, alive to the dangerous slippage possible from the solitary poet-hero’s self-mastery and its tyrannous possibilities, exposed his poet-heroes to his audience’s doubt, courting both the reader’s enchantment by such power and rejection of its misuse.⁸ Shelley, demanding that his poet-hero must perform as both prophet and legislator, sought to do justice to both the eternal and the temporal, precariously balancing the claims of both in his tensed electric poetry.⁹ The poet-hero is part of the zeitgeist, the ‘endowment of the age in which [the poet] live[s]‌’, but also liberated from the contemporary moment, free to unleash ‘the uncommunicated lightning of [his] own mind’ (Preface to Prometheus Unbound, 230–31). Byron and Shelley present the demands and potential abuse of poetic heroism, even questioning its possibility in the world, as both poets scrutinize as well as create versions of poet-heroes in their work. The poet-hero becomes the key means for Byron and Shelley to meditate how the poet might be fitted to engage with, change and re-create the world, or become its victim.

Byron and Shelley’s work is frequently in dialogue and, as Charles E. Robinson writes, ‘in a very real sense, each was a student of the other, whose works he read, criticized, and remembered’.¹⁰ Byron and Shelley, ‘fellow Serpent[s]‌’ (BLJ 9: 81), shared a fascination with the potentiality and the pitfalls of poetic power, and their works converge on exploring the possibility of the poet-hero. The poetic conversation between the two poets, where the critic can trace ‘how complementary the pair were’,¹¹ sees each spur the other on to profounder portraits of poetic heroism. This study sees Byron and Shelley’s as a synergetic relationship where the poet-hero, in each of their oeuvres, develops through the artistic interchange between the two poets. Unlike Wordsworth and Coleridge, of whom Thomas McFarland can write, ‘The intellectual relationship of Coleridge and Wordsworth has scarcely any cultural counterpart. It is almost impossible to bring to mind any other two figures, so important each in his own right, but also dependent the one upon the other during his richest intellectual years,’¹² Byron and Shelley do not connect through mutual dependence. Though their relationship is, as William D. Brewer claims, ‘difficult to characterize in simple terms’,¹³ it is in their formulations of poetic heroism that their intellectual connection reaches its highest pitch. While the poetry and drama that each produced inspired the other’s writing, Byron and Shelley share the same poetic risk-taking impulse, not Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s close-knit psychological and poetic fusion that Byron would mock in Don Juan.¹⁴ Byron and Shelley’s explorations of the poet-hero retain a self-conscious independence. To consider the fascination with poetic heroism that binds them together is to comprehend more fully their remarkable, though complementary, singleness.

It is Byron and Shelley’s aesthetic and ethical experimentation with poetic heroism that unites the work of both poets. To create or to become a poet-hero is a dangerous but ultimately enriching aspiration where the poet-hero, distinguished by his creative agency and poetic power, is celebrated and challenged.¹⁵ Byron and Shelley’s fascination with the poet-hero remains consistently present in their poetry and drama. Neither poet confines their exploration to within the epic, the traditional genre of the hero.¹⁶ This choice to extend the significance of the hero bears witness to their shift from presenting a warrior hero, familiar in epic poetry as a supernaturally gifted individual,¹⁷ to a poet-hero, whose language becomes the key locus and site of anxiety of his power. Byron and Shelley capitalize on the extraordinary latitude of the definition of heroism, where ‘the composite hero of the monomyth is a personage of exceptional gifts’, but he may be ignored or feted by his society, suffer from a fatal flaw or live virtuously, operate in a fallen world or one ‘on the point of falling’ and hope to achieve either ‘a domestic, microcosmic triumph’ or ‘a world-historical, macrocosmic triumph’.¹⁸ Their vital twist to the heroic myth is the movement away from the physical hero of the epic to an emphasis on the poet’s struggle with language as heroic. Their achievement lies in their scrutiny as well as celebration of this role.

Though Harold Bloom casts Robert Browning’s Childe Roland as the ‘modern poet-as-hero’,¹⁹ this study sees his Romantic predecessors as already testing such a possibility in their work. Unlike Homer’s epic principle, where ‘the poet has no intention of saying anything untraditional’,²⁰ Byron and Shelley insistently individualize poetic tradition to draw the poet directly into heroic struggle where words might become deeds in their language-obsessed poetry.²¹ Liberating heroes from their conventional epic context, Byron and Shelley recast inherited forms and genres to draw the roles of the poet and hero together. Byron and Shelley’s poet-heroes are found across all genres, in the sonnet, the lyric, elegy, romance and beyond, as both poets assess rather than accede to the idea of the poet as a hero, shaping poet-heroes that frequently problematize or undermine the concept in their work. Caroline Levine emphasizes the importance of the intersection between the poetic and the political, arguing that ‘it is the work of form to make order. And this means that forms are the stuff of politics’,²² and her insight is suggestive of the interconnection between poetic inspiration and political intervention so vital to Byron and Shelley. Rather than assessing the actual political influence or beliefs of their work,²³ this study concerns itself with how both poets sought to gain purchase in this arena, and this is integrally connected with their development of the poet-hero.

Heroism has become a less popular subject in recent discussions of the Romantic poets. Since Mario Praz’s The Hero in Eclipse in Victorian Fiction,²⁴ with its focus on the Victorian novel as opposed to Romantic poetry, mentions of the hero in poetry of the period have often been more abundant in studies of genre.²⁵ Critics have chosen to hone in squarely on the epic,²⁶ or on its relationship with the novel,²⁷ covering the tradition of commentary on the Bildungsroman and historical novel that runs from Hegel through Lukács, rather than considering the centrality or makeup of the hero in the poem. Heroism is mentioned en passant rather than forming the centre of such studies by the nature of their design. Individual studies have picked out the significance of Byron and Shelley’s heroes and self-representation. Peter L. Thorslev rightly argues that ‘no poetry in English affords a better opportunity for the study of the Romantic hero than Lord Byron’, but his book is more taxonomical than analytical, and he excludes Byron’s comic poetry from consideration.²⁸ On the other hand, Judith Chernaik’s subtle exploration of Shelley’s lyrics draws attention to the deliberate and imaginatively transformative quality of Shelley’s apparent self-portraits,²⁹ but her study does not attempt to view such self-portraits as poet-heroes. Likewise, Timothy Clark’s excellent study on Embodying Revolution: The Figure of the Poet in Shelley,³⁰ focuses on Shelley’s conception of the role of the poet in the social sphere, but chooses not to read the poetry closely, which this study views as vital to an understanding of how the poetry operates in relation to the heroic impulse. For Shelley’s performance of heroism stems from an attempt to create and critique the ultimate Shelleyan hero: the poet-hero. However, the critical tide has turned against such interest in the self of the poet and the idea of the hero. If, as Stuart Curran writes, it is ‘possible that we are holding up a mirror to ourselves and calling the reflection Romanticism’,³¹ the version of Romantic poetry that critics seek and find reflects our own ideological position. Scholarship has responded to and extended Jerome McGann’s foundational claim that ‘the scholarship and criticism of Romanticism and its works are dominated by a Romantic Ideology, by an uncritical absorption in Romanticism’s own self-representations’.³² Historicist critics, intent on breaking the familiar Romantic ideology of the poet as an isolated individual, have usefully foregrounded the frequently collaborative nature of Romantic poetry, such as the networks created and sustained by the Wordsworth circle, Leigh Hunt’s coterie and women’s epistolary networks,³³ demonstrating the fallacy of the Romantic poet working in a vacuum.

But such attention to the collaborative realities of Romantic poetic production can overshadow the poetry’s own claims for its status as made by a unique individual. These claims should not be understood as egotistical self-aggrandizement on the part of the poets. ‘Contrary to critical rumor’, writes George Bornstein, ‘there are far fewer romantic confessional or personal poems than hostile scholars claim’.³⁴ This is particularly true of Byron and Shelley, where ‘personal’ autobiographical self is alchemized into the poet-hero. Their work scrutinizes what the poet-hero might mean by forcing the ‘I’ to become the site of exploration rather than achieved certainty. Coleridge articulated the implications of the poetry written between 1727 and 1800 when he emphasized the importance of the poet’s passion in Biographia Literaria.³⁵ Yet it was for Byron and Shelley to embody Coleridge’s meaning when he wrote, ‘They [images] become proofs of original genius only as far as they are modified by a predominant passion; or by associated thoughts or images awakened by that passion; or when they have the effect of reducing multitude to unity, or succession to an instant; or lastly, when a human or intellectual life is transferred to them from the poet’s own spirit.’³⁶ The importance of the poet as the creative agent of the poetry insists on the self as the alpha and omega of artistic production. Yet Byron and Shelley undermine the ‘egotistical sublime’ implicit in Coleridge’s formula,³⁷ questioning the potential of the poet by opening the role to close scrutiny. If ‘the poet & the man are two different natures’ (Letters: PBS II, 310), Byron and Shelley force a fresh consideration of what the poet is and can become, where heroism is the ultimate aim as well as a dangerous avatar of the poet. Byron and Shelley’s poetry intimates, as Isaiah Berlin paraphrases Vico, that ‘man is not distinguishable from the actual process of his development’,³⁸ and such attention to the process of becoming rather than an achieved status fires the vital struggle to merge the poet and the hero in their work.³⁹

Poetic heroism, though not confined to the Romantic period, became a major site of exploration in the post-Revolutionary period. Jonathon Shears claims: ‘Johnson could not subscribe to the opinion that the poet was also a hero, which, as we shall see with Coleridge, the Romantics certainly did.’⁴⁰ This formulation suggests that, for the Romantic poets, there was an unshakeable confidence that the poet is, de facto, a hero. None of the Romantic poets regard poetic heroism with such complacency in their frequently anxious explorations of the self and the role of the poet. But Byron and Shelley stand apart from their peers in their desire to attain this status even as they critique any such notion of heroism. As Nicolas V. Riasanovsky shows: ‘The role of the poet and the artist occupied a central position in all stages of romanticism, although it did not escape change […] The poet or the artist was, thus, a demiurge creating the world.’⁴¹ Yet for Byron and Shelley, such apparent godlike power cannot be assumed and must be actively questioned. Poetic heroism needs to be fought for even as both resist the potentially tyrannical position held by the poet. James Chandler’s England in 1819 points up the doubleness of Romantic sense of poetic power: ‘The emergence of this distinction – between writings as marking and making history – is a crucial part of what defines the new concept of culture and what now, as then, underwrites historicist interpretation.’⁴² Throughout their oeuvres, Byron and Shelley explore the possibility of marking and making history, but both go beyond the purview of historicist interpretation as they attempt to make and mark meaning within history and outside of its parameters. While Jerome J. McGann’s summary of the first-generation Romantics is undeniably reductive, it would strike a note of resonance for the second generation Romantic poets: ‘Blake fell silent, Wordsworth fell asleep, and Coleridge fell into his late Christian contemptus. The second generation Romantics, however, fashioned from these evil times a new set of poetic opportunities.’⁴³ The struggle to seize these ‘poetic opportunities’ becomes vital to Byron and Shelley’s sense of poetic heroism. Their daring formal experimentation saw them range through genres, from the epic to the sonnet, to place the creative self under the stress that would render him heroic. The particularly poetic cast to their heroism sponsors this study’s decision to focus on poetry itself above all, performing a close analysis of their work to demonstrate the importance of an historically inflected brand of formalism to reading Byron and Shelley’s poetry and drama. For the poet-hero, like poetic form itself,⁴⁴ must function within his context as well as transcend it. The poet-hero allows both poets to explore the potential of poetry to act in the world via the word.

The Romantic period was fundamentally obsessed with heroism as ‘the Romantic era witnessed a world almost constantly at war’.⁴⁵ Wellington, Nelson and many others, with their military pomp and status, loomed large over Byron and Shelley’s society, but no figure more so than Napoleon. Byron’s fascination with Napoleon is well documented, with Fiona MacCarthy, on the first page of her biography of Byron, referring to ‘the long shadow of Napoleon’ that ‘loomed over Byron’s life’ as ‘an inspiration and an irritant’.⁴⁶ Napoleon’s continuing presence in Byron’s art sheds light on Byron’s fluctuating confidence in the power of poetry and the role of the poet. Though critics have noted the poet’s semi-serious deprecation of poetry,⁴⁷ Byron does not simply see art as inferior to action. Often, poetic power wins out over military might. Jeffrey N. Cox notes that ‘unlike Napoleon who lingered on, Manfred knows when to die’,⁴⁸ and Daniel Westwood insightfully shows that in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage III, Napoleon ‘begins to resemble a failed Byronic poet’, when his diminished capacity ‘to create and dictate a version of the self to others’ threatens his heroism.⁴⁹ Simon Bainbridge draws attention to heroism as a suspect idea in Byron’s lifetime,⁵⁰ and Byron seems compelled by creating and critiquing any potential hero figures in his work, aspiring towards and recoiling from the poet-hero role he seems to ‘want’ (Don Juan I. 1: 1). Likewise, Shelley, though critics have not tracked his relationship with Napoleon as closely as they have Byron’s,⁵¹ had ‘an engagement with Napoleon Bonaparte as a sustained and important feature of [his] work’.⁵² Shelley knew that Byron was enthralled by Napoleon’s legend, as James Bieri shows,⁵³ but Shelley seems compelled less by potentially heroic individuals than by the poet’s responsibility to unveil the larger system of power that creates and sustains cycles of oppression and revolution. The Mask of Anarchy sees Murder and Fraud wear masks of Castlereagh and Eldon’s faces, forcing our recognition of the structural violence of society, and Jeffrey N. Cox argues compellingly for Prometheus Unbound as attempting to embody how ‘love can ground hope, can make it something to act on rather than a dream that ends in disappointment’.⁵⁴ Cian Duffy’s insight that ‘remarkable as it may seem, the Napoleon of The Triumph of Life can be understood – in the terms of Shelley’s approximately contemporary Defence of Poetry (1821) – as a failed poet’⁵⁵ seems less remarkable than apposite. Shelley, who seeks to be a poet-hero in the mould of Dante, sought to become an ‘awakener of entranced Europe’ (A Defence of Poetry, 693). Military success could not redeem Napoleon from being ‘a most unambitious slave’ (‘Feelings of a Republican on the Fall of Bonaparte’, 2),⁵⁶ lacking the bold imaginative vision to transform that which he would conquer. Shelley, in his role as legislator and prophet, must boldly balance ethical and aesthetic power to achieve the status of poet-hero. If heroism, as a military mode, was doomed to fail in the light of Napoleon’s moral and physical demise, poetic heroism might have a chance of changing the world even as it runs a similar risk of defeat.

Byron and Shelley, despite their fascination with poetic heroism, do not assume it as an unquestionably positive role for the poet, or that the poet can become a hero at whim. How the poet can lay claim to such heroism is frequently under the spotlight. In the case of Byron, he had fashioned heroes from early in his career, but in his Tales, they are not preoccupied with the role of language in the same way that his poet-heroes, beginning with the speaker of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, are shown to be. The Tales fascinate for the instability and ambiguity of the heroism that they present,⁵⁷ but Byron never presents these early heroes as either attempting or attaining the status of the poet-hero. The closest that Byron comes to poetic heroism in the Tales is to build Lara’s possible heroism on his silence,⁵⁸ but this, while foregrounding language, does so through its lack. As such, the scope of this study falls outside of these poems. But it is Byron’s irony that has proved the biggest threat to any consideration of his poet-heroes, and readings of Byronic heroism per se. Jane Stabler’s elegant summary, ‘Where Wordsworth’s sublimity and Shelley’s Platonism could be demystified, Byron had already unpicked his moments of vision’,⁵⁹ goes some way to suggesting how Byron’s poet-heroes have been dismissed; Byron seemed to do as much himself. Yet Byronic heroism is a particularly ambiguous rather than a wholly ironized construction. Herbert Tucker represents critics who see Byron as destroying the idea of the heroic in his epic experiment, Don Juan: ‘As Byron succeeded Scott on the poetic throne, his annihilation of existing heroic ideals and radical redefinition of the will-to-narrate drove epic into a bankruptcy from which nothing could redeem it short of apocalypse.’⁶⁰ Such a claim is too strong. Byron’s undermining of the hero depends on its existence; he needs the very structures he shakes. Though sardonic when he writes that ‘heroes are but made for bards to sing’ (Don Juan VIII, 14: 109), there lurks an unapologetic boast of the poet’s power. Likewise, Marilyn Butler’s claim that the Byronic hero’s rebellion is ‘drained of ideological content, to a degree actually remarkable in the literature of the period’ should give pause.⁶¹ Emptiness, in and of itself, forms a subtle protest against the systematizing (‘when a man talks of system, his case is hopeless’ (BLJ 6: 46)) that Byron felt polluted poetry and culture of his day.⁶² For Byron, the problem of the poet-hero becomes the central preoccupation of his art. His portrait of the poet-hero is of a solitary figure, though often surrounded by others, a figure who chooses alienation from rather than integration within a community. But Byron does not wholly endorse the poet-hero that he creates. The defiant will, isolation combined with worldliness, and an obsession with language become the hallmarks of the Byronic brand of poet-hero, with some elements magnified, some muted, in each poetic production. Bringing the self into dangerous proximity with his heroes, from Harold and Manfred’s isolated angst, to the narrators of Don Juan and Beppo, whose speakers sound like the poet in propria persona,⁶³ to Faliero and Arnold, one an ageing and unlikely rebel, the other a vainglorious aspirant, Byron courts and denies poetic heroism. Byronic poet-heroes are never completely celebrated nor are they entirely condemned, but they remain compellingly possible, in all but The Deformed Transformed, which uses his earlier poet-heroes as the standard by which to damn his protagonist. But Byron’s final play is no palinode. Rather, its intense interest in the possibilities of the poet-hero shows its spectre to loom more largely across the play, where all that Arnold aspires to is everything he cannot attain. The poet-hero is the subject of both yearning and questioning in Byron’s complex poetry and drama.

Shelley’s poet-heroes are shaped from the heat and pressure of performing as both the legislator and the prophet in his poetry and drama. Shelley’s prose poem, A Defence of Poetry, delineates the ideal poet as one who ‘essentially comprises and unites both these characters’ (A Defence of Poetry, 677), and the challenge to the artist is how to best balance the claims of the legislator, operating in the temporal sphere, with the prophet, whose eye remains trained on the ‘intense inane’ (Prometheus Unbound 3. 4. 204). Such a balancing act suggests how critics frequently read Shelley in very different terms, with some viewing him as a committed radical political poet,⁶⁴ and others as the ‘ineffectual angel’ devoted to a version of the Platonic eternal.⁶⁵ Harold Bloom shows Shelley as possessing an ‘incurable and involuntary dualism’, but rather than seeing it in fatalistic terms, this study considers such dualism the result of Shelley’s preoccupation with uniting the temporal and the eternal facets of the poet-hero.⁶⁶ Shelley forces his poet-heroes to shoulder the claims of the wordly and the infinite, intervening on behalf of those oppressed by ‘Rulers who neither see nor feel nor know, / But leechlike to their fainting country cling’ (‘Sonnet: England in 1819’, 4–5) even as they owe their power to their attempt to ascend the ‘unascended heaven’ of eternity (Prometheus Unbound 3. 2. 203).⁶⁷ Adjusting the levels of legislator and prophet from poem to poem, Shelley’s work attempts to range across and beyond human experience. The poet-hero, then, earns his title from this struggle to both ‘measure the circumference and sound the depths of human nature’ even as he must become the ‘hierophant[s]‌ of an unapprehended inspiration’ (A Defence