Byron Among the English Poets

Book excerpt: 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.