Byron's Reductions: "Much Too Poetical"

Abstract

E. J. Trelawney records that in 18922 Byron told Shelley of the criticisms Murray, Byron's publisher, had of his dramas. Murray thought them unstageable and, worse, unmarketable, and urged Byron in the double interest of art and commerce to resume his Corsair style, to please the ladies. When Shelley reacted with predictable heat and poetic outrage, Byron smiled and replied: John Murray is right, if not righteous: all I have yet written has been for woman-kind; you must wait until I am forty, their influence will then die a natural death, and I will show the men what I can do.'2 There is so much of Byron in this anecdote that it might well serve for an emblem of his ambiguous position in English Romanticism, and of his even more ambiguous fate at the hands of his critics. It is useful to try to think in the critical terms current before the generalizing evaluation Romantic was coined for these poets. Shelley and Byron, particularly-the so-called Satanic school-belong together in a unique and complex imaginative symbiosis that illumines both their works. But a part of that symbiosis is their radical opposition. And here, confronted with the views of his friend the apocalyptic prophet and of his friend the bookseller and paymaster, Byron characteristicallyand feistily-opts for the absent paymaster. For Byron, there is no doubt that the act of poetry always made more sense as per-