Byron's Ars Politica

The standard critical line on Byron's work is that he saw the poetical and the political as antithetical endeavours: poetry doesn’t make things happen, while politics does. Certainly, Byron was keen to figure himself as a man of ‘Actions – actions’ (BLJ 2, 345) rather than a man of letters. The narrative of Byron's life readily lends itself to this characterisation, his career as a public figure being launched in Parliament fighting on behalf of the frame breakers, and ending not quite fighting for Greek emancipation. Yet the overarching contention of this essay is not merely that Byron is an artist with political motivations and inclinations, but that he perceived and practised poetry – specifically satire – as a politically inflected artform. Beginning with consideration of Byron's Whiggish satires on the State of the Nation, the essay proceeds to consideration of Byron's most overt yoking of poetry and politics in his satires against the Lake school, specifically Wordsworth and Southey – themselves practitioners of poetically inflected prosody. Having attended to Byron's most overt satirical treatment of Southey's prosody in his own Vision of Judgment (1822), the essay closes by arguing that Byron's own prosodic practice, far from anti‐political, meets the poet's own demands for poetical‐political liberty.