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
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