The cambridge companion to british roman 39

The living pantheon of poets in 1820 the Reynolds-Hood commonplace book.11 Poets themselves indicated their engagement with contemporary poetry through direct or indirect imitation, opposition, and celebration Byron had made a number of conspicuous dedications of his work to other contemporary poets – The Giaour to Rogers, and The Corsair to Moore – and in 1820 we find Shelley dedicating The Cenci to Hunt, and Hunt dedicating his Amyntas to Keats Byron used a quotation from Moore for his epigraph to The Giaour, and, looking to 1820, we find others following suit “Barry Cornwall” provided epigraphs for the three parts of his Marcian Colonna, Byron (Lament of Tasso, 1817) supplying the epigraph to the first part, Coleridge (Sibylline Leaves of 1817) and John Wilson (Isle of Palms, a Lake-Poet-influenced volume of 1812) supplying that to the second, and Wordsworth (“Vaudracour and Julia” just published in 1820 with The River Duddon Sonnets) supplying that to the third Again, Jeremiah Holmes Wiffen included in his Julia Alpinula; with The Captive of Stamboul and Other Poems not only references again to Byron and Wordsworth but also a quotation from Cornwall’s own Marcian Colonna published just a few months earlier Shelley provided “Ode to Liberty,” published with Prometheus Unbound, with an epigraph from Byron’s Childe Harold IV; and John Abraham Heraud issued his Legend of St Loy With Other Poems which included a sonnet praising Southey and which opened with “On First Reading the Remains of Henry Kirke White, 9th April 1819,” celebrating Southey’s edition of White, who had died in 1806 Even satires on contemporary poems are signs of their significance, as in Reynolds’s and Shelley’s parodies of Wordsworth’s Peter Bell, where Wordsworth’s delayed publication of what had originally been a lyrical ballad is now read as a betrayal of the poet’s earlier experimental promise and as an embrace of the powers of political and religious reaction; and we might also note responses to Moore such as The Fudger Fudged; or the Devil and T∗∗∗ Y M∗∗∗ E (1819) and such take-offs of Byron as Lady Caroline Lamb’s A New Canto (1819) or Despair, A Vision Derry Down and John Bull, A Simile Being Two Political Parodies on “Darkness,” and a Scene from “The Giaour,” by Lord Byron (1820) Celebrations and attacks begin to define what poets found innovative and disturbing in the work of their contemporaries We should also note the attention paid by reviewers to volumes of new verse Shelley and Keats may not have sold many copies, but their poetry was reviewed – and thus excerpted – rather widely: one could, for example, read the entirety of “Ode to a Nightingale” in Hunt’s Indicator Keats’s three volumes received at least eight, fifteen, and fourteen reviews respectively, and those reviews, positive and negative, appeared in key journals such as The Monthly Magazine, the Quarterly Review, The Edinburgh Review, the Eclectic Review, the Examiner, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, and The 17 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008