ABSTRACT
This chapter observes Lord Byron's natural assumption of what might be called a civic, or patriotic, responsibility, indicating certain humility such as you find in Alexander Pope, but scarcely in William Blake, William Wordsworth, or Percy Bysshe Shelley. Pope and Byron claim less, in a way, for themselves; they speak as mouthpieces of a living, yet traditional, order, not as lonely, self-inspired or God-inspired, prophets. No sensitive reader of this poem, and certainly no one attuned to the rest of Byron's work, will waste time on any suspicion of the poet's emotional integrity. Whatever Byron, or his diction, or literary theories, stood for, it was not really definable as a system: it was not thought out, not invented. Byron was not, of course, out to attempt any such transcendental flights as those of a Blake or a Wordsworth. Bryan Bowles was arguing from a romantic view nature was in itself a more poetical subject than things made by man.
