“Those Suspended Pangs”: Romantic Reviewers and the Agony of Byron's Mazeppa

Abstract

In his late verse-tale Mazeppa, Byron offered a spectacular depiction of torture that outraged or confounded most of his periodical reviewers. Seeming to shift attention from the internal agonies of heart and mind to the external agonies of a pained body, the “revolutionary” poem challenged the era's poetic conventions along with its understandings of human nature. Responding with disgust, indifference, and displacement, reviewers forcefully reiterated proscriptive definitions of sympathy and staged rhetorically the dramatic failure of the poet's new experiment, rendering both ludicrous and perverse Byron's monstrous ambition to bring debased physical agony into the higher spheres of poetic sentiment. Examining both the poem and its reviews through a set of sustained readings, this article troubles assumptions held by many contemporary romantic scholars and humanitarian activists. The reception of Byron's poem demonstrates, first, that romantic forms and themes can give vivid expression to neglected or repressed instances of material agony. Yet it demonstrates, also, that even the most prominent and vivid expression of pain can counter humanitarian responsiveness as much as prompt it. The scene of Mazeppa's reception complicates our understanding of the era's representational politics, suspending our certainty and helping us to further historicize our understandings of sympathy.