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
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