Byron and Place: History, Translation, Nostalgia by Stephen Cheeke Byron, Poetics and History by Jane Stabler (review)

Abstract

796 Reviews romance pervades the poetry of the time and the sensibility of the whole nineteenth century. Byron, on the other hand, is, in contradistinction, an English Goya. Southey (of course) has it both ways. But none of the writers actually experienced war. Scott fantasized in the militia, and Byron took a Homeric helmet to Missolonghi. That is as near to action as they got. It explains something of the remoteness, for instance, of 'Spanish' epic at the time. Given the enormous ideological, economic, and political consequences of the wars, perhaps the academically fashionable emphasis on 'gender' is sometimes a little precieux. For instance, when Wordsworth calls on Milton, Harrington, and Sydney as his mentors and Scott calls upon Spenser, Milton, and Dryden, the point at issue may not be exactly 'remasculinization'. Scott, like Southey in A Vision ofJudge? ment, deliberately elides (and aestheticizes) major political and religious differences for 'patriot' ends, but Wordsworth calls up the shades of republicans or regicides. As Byron wrote, himself demasculinizing a blood-bedabbled Tory, would Milton have obeyed that 'intellectual eunuch Castlereagh' ?The word 'intellectual' is as important as 'eunuch'. The poets warred with words, and, for Byron, those words were about respublica, or, as Godwin wrote, 'things as they are'. Cardiff University Malcolm Kelsall Byron and Place: History, Translation, Nostalgia. By Stephen Cheeke. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave. 2003. x + 24ipp. ?47.50. ISBN 1-4039-0403-0. Byron, Poetics and History. By Jane Stabler. (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism) Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. 2002. xiv + 25ipp. ?40; $55. ISBN0-521-81241-0. Readers with an interest in Byron will have encountered some of the arguments of these books before in advance articles by Stabler and Cheeke in the Byron Journal (vol. 26, 1998, and vol. 27, 1999, respectively). These were interesting, suggestive essays, here even more rewardingly contextualized into wider arguments. Stephen Cheeke makes claims forhis reading as a key to understanding Byron's writing career, as a kind of metanarrative through which we might read Byron ('the notion of being thererepresents the most powerful and complex aspect of Byron's work, even as it is perhaps the most obvious and immediate element of Byron's enduring fame' (p. 6)). Jane Stabler refuses any greater narrative than that of particular kinds of reading?the responses of contemporary reviewers, Byron's friends, and publishers as early readers of his work in progress, and her own close attention to Byron's various kinds oftextual digression. However, despite the difference in approach of the two books and even, in places, differentconclusions (there is some potential disagreement about Byron's 'nostalgia' forEngland), both share a number of important features and interests,such as Byron's 'discontinuouslycontinuous relationship with England' (Stabler, p. 1). Cheeke uses the new methodologies of geo-criticism in his attention to history and life-story,and in doing so he resituates Byron's poetry as a Romantic poetry of place, albeit a 'place' radically differentfrom the landscape of Wordsworthian Ro? manticism. Geographical place is also historical site and personal experience: Byron's (and history's) places include Newstead, Harrow, Albania, Greece, Scotland, Troy, Waterloo, Clarens and the Alps, Ferrara, Rome, and Venice, among others. Byron imbues place with an aura which, while not altogether differentfrom Wordsworth's natural supernaturalism, replaces Wordsworth's local spots with the places of histor? ical fame, 'being physically present where history has occurred' (p. 9). Cheeke writes of how Byron's belief that 'the fact of having been there on the spot had a profound literary value in itself (p. 54) informs his argument with Wordsworth's parochialism MLRy 100.3, 2005 797 and bequeaths his poetry an authenticity, indeed, appropriately, an authority possible only through direct experience. The study is thus inevitably structured through the narrative of Byron's life,what Cheeke names as the experiences of 'being there', 'being in-between', and 'having been there', neatly divided into the periods of Byron's lifein England and firsttours on the Continent (1807-18), years of increasing acculturation in Italy (1818-21), and years of nostalgia (1821-24) as Byron revisits the past (par? ticularly the years 1811/12-1815/16). Although these experiences...