Parody, Byron, and Race: Being Derivative in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay contributes to recent scholarly work on the afterlives of British poetry around the Anglophone world by focusing on how ordinary and anonymous writers in the United States reused the poetry of Lord Byron. It contends that imitations and parodies of Byron that proliferated in newspapers show his poetry to have been malleable, as useful to abolitionists as it was to defenders of white supremacy. Drawing on the methods of historical poetics, the essay examines parodies in the context of their social lives, investigating how people read, understood, and used widely circulating poetry. With this evidence, it contends that many writers used popular poems as metrical templates for their own thoughts and arguments, and uses this insight to analyze parodies of Byron’s The Bride of Abydos (1813) that took radically different stances toward the enfranchisement of Black Americans. It concludes that the original poem’s formal features—its meter, its rhyme, and especially its rhetorical structure—made it useful to writers who wanted to question the unity of the nation before and after the Civil War.