Byron’s Opposition

Abstract

This chapter examines Byron’s poetry in relation to his continuing attachment to an oppositional ‘party’ role, on the one hand, and his cultivated detachment from English politics, on the other. Byron wrote The Vision of Judgment, his 1821 riposte to Robert Southey’s Tory celebration of the reign of George III, from what he described as a ‘Whig point of view’. Rather than aligning with the ‘devil’s party’ of a Satanic opposition or cultivating a checked-out, bemused, indifferent stance, that poem—in common with Byron’s late satirical poetry more widely—established a stance at once of crisp detachment and incipient political critique (one that, in consigning the political world left undone by George III to oblivion, looked back to preceding decades of oppositional dynamism). Byron thereby provides a test-case for this book’s wider arguments about the relationships between literature and politics—and more specifically between partisanship and disaffection—bringing into focus the contours of a combative, snarling ‘cynicism’ and ways of seeing beyond politics altogether.