Infidel on Parnassus: Lord Byron and the North American Review

Abstract

THE vogue of Lord Byron in America, brief but prodigious, has long been known to students of our early literature. They have shown us Byronic collars circling the necks of scores of dark-eyed poets and countless melancholy heroes, doers of dark deeds, ranting against life's injustices in addresses to turbulent mountain torrents and desolate forests where suffering men can hide their pain. Long since planted on library shelves, nevertheless, the testaments of Byronic fervor and the witnesses of its passing have rested undisturbed for decades. Why now raise the dust on these leaves? For a later day a literary fad in any age tells tales. Behind the fanfare and the furor lie the links in a chain of circumstance that bind the moment to a broader, deeper meaning. For all the discordant passion Americans spent over Byron, it is far more the genesis of their own literature which holds the historian than the presence in this distant province of an English poetic celebrity. Had Byron come to the United States a conquering hero who overwhelmed the amorphous literary circles forming around the cult of London fashions, he should have added little to his fame. Here was a brawling, bursting stripling of a country bent on self-assertion. It used for its ends anything which came to hand, natural, human, literary, institutional. More a name than a figure of mortal flesh, Byron became an actor in the pageant of national awakening, and thus through him we may see in one sector of this spectacle something of the fitful growth of American culture. The years of Byron's fame were those of national autonomy for the new United States. A second struggle with England behind them, as a nation they developed a new awareness, a sense of power, a feeling of wholeness. Following the feats of Jackson, Perry, and their fellows, Americans inched forward on other