Byron, the Pyramids, and "Uncertain Paper"

Addressing Coleridge, in The Prelude, Book V, Wordsworth complains about the limitations of writing. When the friend confesses "That he himself had oftentimes given way/ To kindred hauntings," Wordsworth describes his dream of the Arab in the desert, the stone, the shell, the world's books, the "shrines so frail," condensed, calcified, threatened "With the fleet waters of a drowning World." The passage, with its dreams and hauntings, speaks to Romantic-period anxieties ranging from the poet's printed legacy to the buried monuments of the ancient Eastern world. In this essay, Stauffer explores these issues by way of Byron, and his imagination of pyramids and paper.