Byron’s Ballroom Poetics and the Echoes of War

Abstract

This article traces what we call Byron’s ‘ballroom poetics’ through Waltz, Don Juan , and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage III. Why, we ask, do balls so frequently serve as an occasion to introduce matters of war? Byron’s frequent invocation of war and wartime in connection with balls and celebration, we suggest, underscores how the distance and drift of war came home to Regency culture. But the occasion of the ball could also be brought to the warfront as in Byron’s account of the Duchess of Richmond’s ball in Childe Harold III, which shows how the memories of past battles, and anticipations of future ones, weigh on the minds of the living and how that weight infuses even moments of revelry. Ultimately, Byron’s connection between ballroom and battleground reveals how Regency Britons thought about the end (and ends) of the French Revolution, the omnipresence of war, and the fraught prospects of the future unfolding for the nineteenth century and beyond.