I 'What am I? Nothing' (CHP, III, 6), writes Byron. 'Self, that burr that will stick to one', Shelley comments wryly.1 This essay returns to the multi-faceted question of 'identity', especially poetic identity, in a range of works by Byron and Shelley. Both poets convey tugs and pulls in relation to this theme. To his fingertips the poet who, in 'Lines Written among the Euganean Hills', hymns a 'universal light' (208) enveloping 'the towers of Venice' (212), a light that is both identified with and 'like thought-winged Liberty' (207), Shelley is a poet of transference, process, change, movements out of the self. At the same time he is also the poet who brings us back from imagined ends to imaginative origins, the trochaic tetrameter couplets alighting here, with a sense of unveiling a creative source, on 'the mind which feeds this verse / Peopling the lone universe' (318-19).2 As the deictically alert phrase 'this verse' reveals, Shelley has in common with Byron an awareness of being engaged in composition. The effect in both is of poetic identity as a float held in suspension, renewed and altered with every line that they write. In this case, the 'universe', previously evoked in its multiple richness and variety - including such details as 'the line / Of the olive-sandalled Apennine' (305-306) - emerges as 'lone', in need of a befriending 'peopling' on the part of the poet's imagination. However, such imaginative 'peopling' is not painless or triumphantly self-delighting in any cavalier fashion. If Shelley delights in 'a going out of our own nature' (A Defence of Poetry, p. 682), he is alert to the intricate ways in which that 'nature' operates, including its expression of the desire for self-transcendence. Again, Byron may downplay the significance of his mortal self in the terse, even despairing question-and-answer exchange with which this essay began. Yet an immediate 'but' launches canto III of Childe Harold in a different direction, one that imagines the self remodelled through poetry: 'but not so art thou, / Soul of my thought! with whom I traverse earth' (6). If Byron fascinated and repelled contemporaries and later readers through his 'frequent allusions to his own private history', as John Scott loftily put it in an essay for the London Magazine of January 1821,3 he can be seemingly unegotistical as he exalts art: 'The beings of the mind are not of clay', he asserts at the start of Childe Harold IV, with Venice in his thoughts; 'Essentially immortal, they create / And multiply in us a brighter ray / And more beloved existence' (5). 'In us': here Byron presents himself as typical reader as well as sublime writer, and it is an enthralling part of his achievement in Childe Harold IV that he is able to be one with the Grand Tourist and a solitary poetic genius. Speaking of the imaginative fictions of Shakespeare and Otway as able to 'create / And multiply in us a brighter ray', Byron also does justice to the way in which the Romantic reader creates in the process of receiving. That 'brighter ray' might be a 'ray brighter' than the light we know in our quotidian lives; but it is part of the quickness and mobility of Byron's verse, for all its air here of offering a stately set-piece, to suggest that Shakespeare and Otway are enjoying a 'more beloved existence' in the lives of those readers who take them to their minds and hearts. Characteristic of Byron's sense of poetic identity is a feeling that experiential and artistic selves are at once allied and distant. In the next stanza, thanks to the sways of feeling, we learn that it is our 'state / Of mortal bondage' (5) that makes us yearn for 'beings of the mind': 'And this worn feeling peoples many a page, / And, may be, that which grows beneath mine eye' (6). Byronic assertion is itself endlessly double: there is a sense in which 'The beings of the mind are not of clay' means the opposite of what it says, its towering hauteur making us think of what it faces down - the sense that, were it not for our imprisonment within 'our helpless clay' (DJ, I, 63), where 'our' speaks eloquent volumes about Byron's identification with humanity's encasement in flesh and blood, we would not dream of 'beings of the mind' that are 'Essentially immortal'. …