Byron Among the English Poets

For Byron, poetic achievement was always relative. Writing meant dwelling in an echo chamber of other voices that enriched and contextualised what he had to say. He believed that literary traditions mattered and regarded poetic form as something embedded in historical moments and places. His poetry, as this volume demonstrates, engaged richly and experimentally with English influences and in turn licenced experimentation in multiple strands of post-Romantic English verse. In Byron Among the English Poets he is seen as a poet's poet, a writer whose verse has served as both echo of and prompt for a host of other voices. Here, leading international scholars consider both the contours of individual literary relationships and broader questions regarding the workings of intertextuality, exploring the many ways Byron might be thought to be 'among' the poets: alluding and alluded to; collaborative; competitive; parodied; worked and reworked in imitations, critiques, tributes, travesties and biographies.

'This is an ambitious book … contributors study both the voices that Byron invokes and the later voices that invoke him, … Bucknell and Ward deserve praise for producing such a wide-ranging and thought-provoking volume.' Emily A. Bernhard-Jackson, Review19
'… these essays tend to be brilliant and subtle rather than shocking and novel. In fact, there is a tremendous amount of learning contained here, and most readers will find out something new from every single essay, but among the book's greatest pleasures are the recognition and remembrance which inspire the authors to mark new relations among poets and texts.' Brian Goldberg, European Romantic Review

Matthew Ward is Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Birmingham. He has published a range of academic articles in Romanticism, SEL, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, Essays in Criticism, Cambridge Quarterly, and Keats-Shelley Review, on Romantic poetry and Romanticism, and the history of emotions and affect, as well as contributing to the Oxford Handbook of Lord Byron. He is a member of the British Association for Romantic Studies. Clare Bucknell is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. She has published a number of academic articles and contributes regularly to the London Review of Books and Apollo. She is a deputy editor of Critical Quarterly and a member of the Royal Society of Literature.

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