#begrudging byron tag

[lesamis]

are you a Byron or Wilde apologist?

concerned citizens from 1895 are messaging me

[lesamis]

What is byrons greatest sin?

being mean to keats being so funny about his sexism that people still quote some of his top most hilarious 10 instances of misogyny in their papers to this day 😞

[lesamis]

Adhdhhsvsgz you made that post just when I was wondering if it was okay to ask you if you had reading recommendations for how the Romantics viewed or knew of Islam and the Middle East and Mughals / India

oh thank you so much for thinking of me! :D this is a perfectly timed question as i've been researching parts of this myself for the past year, so hopefully some of what i've been reading can be helpful for you too.

your question falls broadly into the field of romantic empire research, so introductory works to romantic imperialism and romantic orientalism are a good place to start. a recurring argument you'll find in these works is the idea that romantic writers were viewing the british empire's expansion into the east, and equally the creation of contact zones between western european and middle eastern and south asian cultures, with a sort of uneasy trepidation which was offset by fascination and fetishisation. i'd especially recommend:

British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire by Nigel Leask, basically the foundational work in the field, and unfortunately the only book i cannot hunt down a pdf of for the life of me. it's very good and worth checking libraries for!

Romantic Imperialism by Saree Makdisi, particularly the introduction and chapters 5 & 6 which are concerned with orientalism in Byron and Shelley

Romanticism and Colonialism ed. by Fulford & Kitson - this is an anthology with an intro very worth reading, but some of the chapters addressing the eastern empire might be helpful as well

Islam and the English Enlightenment 1670-1840 by Humberto Garcia, which is super in-depth; i'd recommend checking out the preface & introduction

Radical Orientalism: Rights, Reform, and Romanticism by Gerard Cohen-Vrignaud, one of my favourite more recent works on romanticism in general; addresses the way romantic writers engaged with reformist and radical politics at home through orientalist discourses.

the canonical writers that most explicitly engaged with this topic are byron, coleridge, and the shelleys. byron might be of special interest to you if you're researching islam and romanticism - he was the only romantic writer with a personal relationship to islam (in part through his role in the war against the ottoman empire, but also because of his genuine interest in the faith prior to that - there's a fringe theory suggesting that he might have converted to it at some point) & there is extensive research on the way this featured in his writing. Byron and Islamic Culture by Peter Cochran is a pretty good synthesis.

another little sub-field you might find useful is research into women writers & the empire in the east, especially because much of the above is very dominated by the male canon - Anne K. Mellor has an introductory article here, and more recently there's been the much more detailed & theoretically complex British Women Writers and the Asiatic Society of Bengal by Kathryn S. Freeman.

i hope some of this helps and that the fact that these are almost all books rather than articles isn’t too off-putting! to me, introductory chapters in anthologies are usually the most helpful for getting an overview. best of luck on your research journeys! :D

[lesamis]

hi lilli! sorry if you've answered this before but i was curious, what is your phd actually about? does byron show up in it?

hi anon! i don't think anyone's ever asked, no worries :') i'm researching the ways in which british colonial developments around 1800 - especially slavery, abolition and the consolidation of british rule in bengal - influenced the affective perception of time in romantic writing. what i'm essentially trying to argue is that the romantic age tended to trap people in this very odd tension between utopian expectation (we're liberators! we're reformers! we're bringing liberty and reform to the entire world!) and existential anxiety (every empire we identify with has eventually fallen! people are starving! we're chopping down all these trees to build war ships! the end is here!). imperial expansion at this time inspired a lot of enthusiasm, and a massive sense of precarity. i'm interested in how those two interact.

byron might show up in it! :D or, like, he almost definitely will. he had a lot to say about disaster.

[lesamis]

Have you come across anything about how the Indians (is it correct to say Bengalis?) were responding to Byron or Blake?

not blake, unfortunately - i think this is related to the fact that his work had almost completely slipped into obscurity for much of the nineteenth century, and he was still leagues away from becoming the canonized wildcard he is now. there is, however, a very good article about byron reception in bengal by abhishek sarkar here! and it's also touched on a little bit in this article by dipesh chakrabarty :)

[lesamis]

another stunning installment in the “female writers underwhelmed by byron” series

[lesamis]

Who would you say is the least problematic Romantic? (and conversely... 👀)

anon this was a delighful way to spend a morning. thank you so much.

The English Romantics From Most to Least Problematic: A Scale Not to Be Taken Seriously and Guaranteed to Include 0% Actual Scholarship

MOST problematic: we knew this was coming. has to be the man himself lord george gordon. we know this. aristocrat so he’s problematic from birth but also once you have to specify “half-sister” things are Bad. nicer to animals than to humans, which is both his only redeeming feature and a further indictment. on a problematic scale from 1-10: a solid 15. 

wordsworth. old men who teach english will disagree w me on this but idk why they always ignore that he had a child in france with a woman he refused to marry and then became a tory. irredeemable. 9/10. 

coleridge. acceptable politics and some actually good poetry but he wrote extensively to his friends abt the health of his dick and i had to read it. outrageously dramatic and not very self-aware but at least he wasn’t wordsworth. problematic score: 7/10

percy. invented the 19th century equivalent of a twitter call-out in Masque of Anarchy which speaks in his favour but he couldn’t swim which is kinda sus. tendency to pull other ppl into his own drama and making a mess despite having pure intentions. problematic score 4/10 could definitely have been worse. 

keats - literally the only self-aware bitch on this list. didn’t live long enough to screw anyone over and hated rich ppl with a passion. once said abt revolutionary assassin Karl Sand that you had to side with him when u saw how hot he was. invented empathy. never had any money at all. appalling views of women but had the decency to be rly ashamed of that so 2/10 not very problematic.

LEAST problematic: william. fucking. blake. never did anything that made sense. absolutely iconic Weird Little Man vibes defy classification as good or bad. 100% in favour of violent and immediate overhaul but hated progress and regression equally, which leaves us on entirely chaotic neutral grounds. will put the fear of god in you unasked and raged against the system to an audience of 2, maybe 3 ppl his whole damn life. too transcendent to be problematic. [R̴͕̘͇̓̀E̷̫͌̊̌̉D̵͙̒A̶̛̭C̸̙̯͒ͅT̶͉̙͉̐̈́͌͝E̸̥̓̔̈́Ḓ̷͈̮̬͗̈̒]/10

[lesamis]

reverse unpopular opinion on lord byron 👀👀

phew, okay :D i guess saying nice things about people you’re usually mean about is the purpose of the exercise!

even within academia, people enjoy talking about byron’s life more than they do his writing, which is a shame, because if you dislike byron for his biography/general vibes/tendency to be a mean bitch, a close look at his writing might reconcile you with him. (”might” being like, the operative word here lmao.) byron does really interesting things with gender, and his writing is emotionally approachable in a way not all romantic works are. there’s a recurring motive in the corsair about how its protagonist, conrad, cannot cry: the women around him do, well and often, but as a man and privateer, he doesn’t appear to have any means of processing grief beyond violence. in the poem’s final canto, when he finally returns from his quest to find that his wife has died in his absence, we get this as the entire poem’s conclusion: 

On Conrad's stricken soul exhaustion prest, And stupor almost lull'd it into rest; So feeble now—his mother's softness crept To those wild eyes, which like an infant's wept: It was the very weakness of his brain, Which thus confess'd without relieving pain. None saw his trickling tears—perchance, if seen, That useless flood of grief had never been:⁠ Nor long they flowed—he dried them to depart, In helpless—hopeless—brokenness of heart. 

it’s devastating. weirdly self-aware of psychological restrictions of masculine representation, too. may the freudians never find it. 

[lesamis]

So, like, was byron hot for keats, or

anon. thank you for asking the real & pressing questions on this fine day. genuinely, i’ve been waiting for this ask my whole life. short answer first: byron’s boiling hatred for keats was indeed, for lack of a better term, kind of horny!   

the longer & more meandering answer: 

byron and keats had no personal relationship at all, never met each other nor wrote to one another, and kept their remarks about one another almost completely about the other’s writing. they had friends in common - hunt and the shelleys - but they didn’t know each other at all. 

that didn’t keep byron from making things weirdly personal. he was offended by keats’s aesthetic principles: himself trying to veer more towards neoclassicism, he thought keats’s writing was overly sensuous and florid; himself admiring and emulating pope, he hated keats’s dismissiveness of any of the 18th century Greats. he found keats’s writing to be immature, indulgent, overeager, and inordinately sensual. it’s not difficult to make a leap from there to the sexualised language byron uses when talking about keats. his greatest hits: 

“The Edinburgh praises Jack Keats or Ketch, or whatever his names are: why, his is the Onanism of poetry- something like the pleasure an Italian fiddler extracted out of being suspended daily by a Street Walker in Drury Lane.”

“Mr. Keats whose poetry you enquire after - appears to me what I have already said; - such writing is a sort of mental masturbation - he is always frigging his imagination.”

“No more Keats, I entreat - flay him alive; if some of you don’t I must skin him myself. There is no bearing the drivelling idiotism of the mankin.” 

byron didn’t invent the idea of giving his criticism of keats sexual overtones - the press was on that, too - but he took it further than anyone else. he did this because he was byron, lord of impropriety, and because he took rather classist offense at keats’s lack of wealth and education, which to him lended itself to vulgarity. but i think he also pulled all this to such a personal level because he was annoyed by shelley’s fondness of keats, jealous of the one (1) favourable review keats received, and uncomfortable with such pronounced sensuality as keats’s being found in the writing of a male poet. in hating keats, he was being his usual bastard self, yes, but if we were being fanciful, it’s not too far-fetched to say that he was also having a bit of a sexual crisis. 

(keats, meanwhile, moved from genuine admiration of byron as a teenager to being mostly unimpressed with him as an adult. “Lord Byron cuts a figure, but he is not figurative” - scathing stuff, john. i would have paid to see them have it out.) 

[lesamis]

Hi lilli, what would you say are the best reading experiences you've had this year?

hi anon! that’s a really wonderful question! 

i’ve gone on about this one before, but the #1 favourite read of my year was confessions of the fox. it’s very funny, very sharp, and made me emotional in all directions at once. if you enjoy history and queer theory and are also deeply disenchanted with academia, you’re bound to find what you’re looking for in this novel. 

since you used the word “experience”, on a sunbeam definitely deserves a spot on the list - it was a birthday gift i really really cherish, because the art takes you on such a vibrant & dream-like journey that it’s a perfect book to get lost in. 

i read marino faliero by byron in a day and wasn’t fully the same person afterwards. for one, i had to start being a person who could begrudgingly admit that Byron Is Good, Actually. on a less petty note, it’s a sobering and accidentally still topical reflection on historiography and truth with some surprisingly sympathetic characters. good on ya, george gordon.  

die letzten tage des patriarchats is an essay collection that gave me something to laugh and cry about when i needed it. if you read german, i highly recommend this for entertainment value, an exercise in critical thought, and a little bit of hope in distressing political times. 

feet of clay was my favourite re-read of the year. it’s like a humanist pick-me-up. voices to the voiceless! clay of my clay! my socialist dad sam vimes says golem rights & i weep my eyes out on the spot!

finally & briefly - i only received this two days ago and it’s maybe a little weird to point out a cookbook as a reading experience, but slater’s prose in greenfeast autumn/winter singlehandedly convinced me to put an effort into meals again. a hug in a book; it’s incredibly warm and kind. also, excellent squash recipes.