Since the nineteenth century, ânatureâ has been one of the defining tropes for organizing British Romanticism as a field of study. Mid-twentieth-century scholars, from Joseph Beech to M. H. Abrams , expelled Byron from the circle of Romantics because of his supposed disinterest in nature. Then, in the late twentieth century, ecocritics challenged the received definitions of Romantic nature poetry, explaining the Romanticsâ turn toward nature as a powerful critique of modernity bequeathed to todayâs environmentalist movements. By using âliterary texts as a means of clarifying historical relationships between humans and environment[s],â ecocritics have significantly expanded the category of ânature writerâ and in the process have redefined British Romanticism (Bergthaller et al. 2014, 270). 1 Yet, despite a few important book chapters and essays, Byron has continued to occupy a marginal position in Romantic ecocritical studies.
This book will recognize Byronâs contribution to Romantic nature philosophy by showing how his bioregional ecosystems thinking complements Romanticismâs more typical ecolocalism , organicism , and the natural sublime. Acknowledging Byronâs cultural ecology means that we can claim a broad spectrum of modern environmental thought in the Romantic period.
A full accounting of Byronâs environmental thought will provide a truer picture of the way writers in the Romantic period coexisted in tension, paradox, contradiction, conflict, and experimentation. Romantic theories of nature are an amalgamation of ideas in motion, evolving though constant cross-pollination, collaboration, synergy, cooptation, and antagonism. Certain theories prevailed, in no small measure because readers read selectively and determined who would be identified as a nature writer and what ânatureâ would mean, but marginalized ideas, such as Byronâs, did not disappear.
The incredible fecundity of thought about nature in the period 1780â1830 means that we must consider cultural transmission itself as a dynamic ecosystem, evolving unpredictably and nonteleologically across time as certain potentials have the opportunity to manifestâas with any other idea, Byronâs cultural ecology requires readers equipped with a certain horizon of understanding.
Given this dynamic model of the intellectual history of nature in the Romantic period, it will be clear why I will not repeat Byronic criticisms of Wordsworth as the poet of the natural sublime and ecolocalist dwelling. In its simplest form, my argument is that Byronâs nature is different from Wordsworthâs. What becomes complicated is figuring out why Wordsworthâs nature has so often been used as a synecdoche for Romantic nature, while Byron has too often been regarded as the only Romantic poet with nothing interesting to say on the subject.
Much of the cause for this attitude toward Byron can be traced to the twentieth centuryâs misguided attempt to establish a unified Romantic canon around coherent themes. Such an approach to intellectual history, by turns both polemical and narrative, led to an overemphasis on binary oppositions. Through the various movements of formalism , post-structuralism , and New Historicism , it was useful to reconfigure the canon around Byron or Wordsworth depending on what âRomanticismâ was supposed to mean: Byron stood for a Romanticism of comparative social and cultural history, irony and comedy, cosmopolitanism , and satire, ottava rima and Spenserian romance; this was the antithesis of Wordsworth, the poet of natural supernaturalism, sincerity and pathos, provincialism and British nationalism, and Miltonic prophesy in blank verse. This consensus changed little during the 1990s when ecocritics began rewriting the Romantic canon around the âturn to nature.â Some who have used a âwaveâ narrative to describe ecocriticismâs evolution would explain this as a result of first-wave ecocritics narrowly defining a ânature writerâ as a poet who celebrates living in harmony with bucolic or wild nature (Buell 2005, 21â27; Slovic 2010, 4â10). 2 If the wave narrative were true, Byron would emerge from the shadows as an important object lesson in second-wave ecocriticismâs correction of the first wave. 3 Statistically speaking, however, this has not happened.
The incoherence of a first- and second-wave narrative is illustrated by the ecocritical scholars who have discussed Byronâs work: Karl Kroeber , Mark Lussier , Jonathan Bate , Christine Kenyon-Jones , and Timothy Morton âindeed, Mortonâs (2007a, b) analysis of Manfredâs confrontation with wild nature seems most like âfirst-waveâ ecocriticism, while Kroeberâs (1994) discussion of Cainâs speculation about evolutionary ecology would be more typical of âsecond-waveâ ecocriticism . In 2000 and 2001, respectively, Bate and Kenyon-Jones made a strong case for Byronâs blurring of ontological boundaries between human and animal, while Lussierâs (1999) work on complexity theory in Romantic poetry was perhaps the most important precedent for my interest in Byronâs vision of nature as dynamic, semisynchronous, nested sets of ecosystems . It remains a striking fact that, while dozens of scholarly monographs have been written about Wordsworthâs nature, little has been written on Byronâs nature.
I propose three reasons why this is so. First, as was just related, is the way the Romantic canon has been constructed by means of a polemical deployment of âByronâ and âWordsworthââfor which Byron and Wordsworth were originally responsible. As binary opposites, âByronâ and âWordsworthâ enable certain narratives of Romantic intellectual history.
The second reason is the fact that ecocriticism emerged in tandem with twentieth-century environmentalism , which prioritized the inhabitation of small-scale rural places in the narrative of ecological enlightenment. Wordsworthâs writing fit environmentalismâs narrative of dwelling in the oikos , but Byronâs engagement with the European polis did not, a division that Green Romanticism has perpetuated, as Kevin Hutchings has demonstrated (2009, 6â13).
The third reason has to do with the evolving, contested field of ecology, which has generated new models for understanding transformation in social and natural systems since the 1990s. Unlike models from philosophy, history, anthropology, or other humanist disciplines, the scientific frameworks do not translate easily to literary history. Yet the notion of âpanarchyâ that I use in this book helps illuminate the systems ecology running through Byronâs work. By looking at Byronâs works through a systems ecology framework instead of a Heideggarian framework, we can see how Byron thinks of natural and cultural formations as part of an integrated, co-creating system transforming through time. How Byron gained that understanding and deployed it in his writings is the subject of this book.
There are three book-length studies of Byronâs lifelong engagement with landscapes, but all three are reliant on a definition of nature as a transcendental life-force, what Coleridge might call âthe one life within us and abroad.â The first book, Ernest J. Lovellâs 1949 Byron: Poet of Nature, concluded that Byron never developed a clear philosophy of nature, nor a feel for it.
The second book, Bernard Blackstoneâs 1975 Byron: A Survey, more rigorously described Byronâs writing as it developed from his understanding of and sympathy for specific places, particularly Greece . Blackstone called his method a âspecies of topocriticism,â and identified Byron and Wordsworth as the two most important topographical poets (xâix).
Mario Lupakâs 1999 Byron as a Poet of Nature attempted an even more exhaustive study of Byronâs landscape writings. All three scholars commit the fatal mistake of using Wordsworthâs nature as the rubric for evaluating Byronâs nature. While Blackstoneâs earlier essay, âByron and the Levels of Landscape,â provided a much more nuanced reading of Byronâs ânatureâcultureâ vision (1974, 3â20), his book did not develop this potential to describe Byronâs ecosystem thinking in contrast to the paradigm of Romantic nature, concluding that Byron, giving into his own despair, achieved only a ânegative transcendentalismâ (1975, 288â343). 4
Lupak contested Blackstoneâs conclusion, arguing that Byron pursued a prelapsarian ideal nature through all of his poetry, finally achieving that vision in his last poem, âThe Islandâ (1999, xii). The governing assumption was that only the transcendental, Edenic idea of nature existed in the Romantic period, and Byron either measured up to that or did not.
A few Romantic ecocritics initiated important studies of Byron that are not reliant on a comparison to Wordsworthâs nature. Karl Kroeberâs few pages on Cain (1994 ) show the poetâs concern for the treatment of the nonhuman other, a theme developed by Jonathan Bate in his 2000 Song of the Earth. Bate suggested that Byronâs life-long love of animals constitutes a nonanthropocentric desire for respectful, reciprocal relations with the world as âother,â in contrast to Wordsworthâs egotistical sublime.
At almost the same time, Christine Kenyon-Jonesâ Kindred Brutes (2001) made Byronâs interest in animals central to the emergent animal rights movement and its ethical critique of anthropocentric dualism . While animal relations have become a key theme in post-humanist ecology, an ecological understanding of animals is a subset of an ecological consideration of human relations to the geophysical, climactic, and biological systems that compose the earth.
That larger ecocritical discussion of Byron has been briefly addressed by only three scholars: Timothy Morton , in his essay on Manfred (2007a, b); Jonathan Bate , in his analysis of âDarknessâ (2000); and Mark Lussier , in his 1999 chapter-length reading of The Giaor (1999). Lussierâs comparisons of Byronâs landscape descriptions to quantum mechanics, and Bateâs connection between climate science and the apocalyptic vis...