The cambridge companion to british roman 47

The living pantheon of poets in 1820 ideologically (she had allies among Tory writers and critics such as William Gifford, Milman, and Reginald Heber, and was praised in the reactionary Quarterly Review of October 1821 by John Taylor Coleridge, but she also worked with Roscoe’s Liverpool circle of cosmopolitan liberals), and her work is the site of productive debates about her stands and style; but, however we read her and her poetry, it is important to remember that in 1820 a woman writer could set out through a philosophical poem to define herself in debate and competition with the leading poet of the day While increasingly the period came to be defined through an opposition between Byron and Wordsworth, in 1820 one might have considered mapping the poetic field along the fault lines between Hemans and Byron And Byron himself certainly took notice, responding to Hemans’s poem in a letter to his publisher John Murray of June 7, 1820,24 where he also indicates his awareness of his immediate poetic context, commenting on other new work in 1820: William Herbert’s Hedin; or, The Spectre of the Tomb A Tale From the Danish History (also published by Murray), the recent volumes of tales and “dramatic scenes” by “Barry Cornwall,” and the translation of the first two cantos of Niccolo` Forteguerri’s Ricciardetto, another Murray product Again, the contemporary debate over framing what we know as Romanticism occurred within a larger context that included women writers, dramatists, narrative poetry, and translations While Hemans points to an alternative construction of the period, the battle lines in 1820 were increasingly between the older poets of Romanticism and their younger contemporaries We have here, however, less the standard story of two generations of Romanticism, with the “sons” of Wordsworth and his fellow Lakers learning from or struggling with the influence of the founding “fathers” of Romanticism, than a moment of struggle between two different versions of Romanticism, roughly between the Lakers and the Cockneys, though at times the battle seems to narrow to a struggle between Wordsworth and Byron as to who will define the course of modern poetry, an opposition that grew sharper over the decade, as seen in such events as a twonight debate in 1828, organized by John Stuart Mill at the London Debating Society, in which he defended Wordsworth against John Roebuck who championed Byron.25 While Wordsworth had been a controversial, experimental poet, Hazlitt noted in The Spirit of the Age (1825) that “the tide has turned much in his [Wordsworth’s] favour of late years He has a large body of determined partisans,”26 and by 1833 Bulwer Lytton, in England and the English, found Wordsworth’s popularity rising at Byron’s expense Romanticism as we know it came into being when it could be identified with a particular (and not Wordsworth’s) version of a Wordsworthian poetic, as Byron, the most popular of these writers, becomes increasingly marginal 25 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008