Byron and His Twentieth-Century Poetic Legacy: Yeats, Auden, Berryman

Abstract

Abstract Throughout the twentieth century, Byron offers expressive opportunities for new generations of poets. However, critics have rarely chosen to explore the contours and content of this influence. This article understands Byron’s influence not as subconscious but as deliberately fashioned by his inheritors, where W. B. Yeats, W. H. Auden, and John Berryman choose the way in which Byron functions as a model in their poetry. Byron is neither forbidding ancestor nor kindly father. What Byron offers to his twentieth-century descendants would not be a shared manner or a collective talent for a well-placed echo or allusion to their precursor. Byron offers a multi-faceted example that his followers would explore and exploit. Focusing upon W. B. Yeats, W. H. Auden, and John Berryman, this article will explore how Byronic Romanticism becomes central to these twentieth-century poets. Byron’s cosmopolitanism offered each of his inheritors a version of an Anglophone poet far removed from the parochial model. Byron becomes an alternative version of Harold Bloom’s ‘exemplary Modern Poet’ especially adapted for twentieth-century purposes.