Suffering, Sacred, or Free: Romantic Revolutions of the Word, with Special Reference to Byron

Abstract:A few signal commonplaces of Romantic poetry are addressed: first, that the movement executed a “revolution of the word”—or perhaps “revolutions,” given the diversity of Romantic practice; that the shift was announced in Wordsworth’s manifesto, the Lyrical Ballads “Preface,” and most elaborately theorized in Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria; and that while Byron was part of the revolution, he didn’t theorize his practice. But like Blake, because Byron’s work took an explicitly anti-systematic position, his “theory” is regularly presented as an argument by poetic practice: a show and tell performance of a language revolution that, he argued, was notably capacious and free.