ABSTRACT
This chapter explores English poet Byron's relationship to the occasional the emergent moment in tension with the larger narrative at an intersection of poetics, politics and print culture. Byron's verses written before 1807 can seem inherently, determinedly apolitical, childish recollections conveying a mixture of triviality and indolence only partially redeemed by moments of pathos or flashes of wit. Her work emerges under the sign of the duality: his is an adventitious, aleatory poetry from the beginning, poetry predicated on the occasional that simultaneously suggests a transcendent purpose or design. The first printed page of Byron's poetry seems prescient, laden with mythic signs not only of the youthful poet's aspirations in 1806 but with variously ironic emblems of his fate through 1824 and beyond. The Morning Chronicle declined to publish Byron's early poem on Fox, that paper the leading Whig daily of the period would go on to become the primary outlet for his political verse.
