What kind – or kinds – of thinker was Byron? What were his philosophical sources and how did these shape the peculiar structures of thought exhibited in his poems, letters and more formal prose? Those who have discussed such questions have usually identified philosophical scepticism, something about which the poet was demonstrably informed, as an important point of reference. M. G. Cooke somewhat reluctantly concluded that Byron ‘is so strongly disposed to mistrust strictly clean categories that the primary bent of his philosophy must be termed skeptical’. For Cooke, scepticism is something to be admitted rather than celebrated: it ‘becomes...

To read Byron’s poetry as philosophy without reference to form is to miss the poetry’s philosophical significance. This seems most pressingly true in the case of Don Juan, a poem in which language is untethered within the precincts of intellectual history with effects that are at once critical and creative. In what follows I want to think about this complicated meeting of philosophy and poetry, something, I suggest, in which Byron was deeply interested, with primary reference to what seems in many ways the poet’s most obviously ‘philosophical’ literary work, Cain.

Byron began writing Cain in Ravenna on 16 July...

On 31 March 1821 Byron, by publishing the prose essay known as the Letter to John Murray, publicly entered the controversy surrounding William Lisle Bowles’s provocative editing and subsequent pamphleteering which queried Pope’s status in the English canon.¹ Appalled by what he saw as Bowles’s modish but ill-considered depreciation of Pope, Byron gave vent to his ire in an extended and uneven prose broadside. He was the only major literary figure of the day to become so involved; his prominent contemporaries, although they would have been aware of the controversy through its dissemination in the literary press, tended to be...

According to Peter Atkins

poets may aspire to understanding, [but] their talents are more akin to entertaining self-deception. They may be able to emphasise delights in the world, but they are deluded if they and their admirers believe that their identification of the delights and their use of poignant language are enough for comprehension. Philosophers, too, I am afraid, have contributed to the understanding of the universe little more than poets […]. They have not contributed much that is novel until after novelty has been discovered by scientists […]. While poetry titillates and theology obfuscates, science liberates.¹

Such diminutions of...

Byron’s ‘wish to do as much by Poesy’ remains partially and crucially submerged in poetry itself. Its incompleteness as a moment of poetics is its first claim. Its second, perhaps surprisingly, is on behalf of theory, although not of the kind Byron associates with Bowles or Wordsworth. The narrator of Don Juan is always keenly susceptible to the advances of doubt, but he resists the sceptic’s satisfaction and conclusiveness; there is a restless search for origin with Byron that has something of Shelley but nothing of the Pyrrhonist. While sneering at ‘system’, Byron commits to theory where it recognizes itself...

Byron’s participation in the Bowles controversy coincided with an increasing involvement in revolutionary politics, prompted by the poet’s relationship with the Gamba family in Italy and his consciousness of revolutions in Spain and Portugal in the summer of 1820. It is perhaps not surprising then that Byron’s defence, via Pope, of the sustaining values of literary tradition is charged with a political awareness that is very much of its moment. The polemical energies generated by the controversy, in turn, flowed into Don Juan, a poem that takes on a new philosophical and political directness from its new beginning with the...