ABSTRACT

Byron from his dandified public personas to his dark-souled poetic heroes, he remained the poster child for cynicism well into the Victorian age. Motivated by criticism in the Edinburgh Review of his earliest published poetry, English Bards mounted a few-holds-barred attack on large swathes of the emerging nineteenth-century literary establishment. In Byron the Satirist, Beaty observed that traces of cynicism can be discerned even in Byrons earliest sentimental lyrics. Lord Macaulay described the prototypical Byronic hero as a man proud, moody, cynical, with defiance on his brow, and misery in his heart, a scorner of his kind, implacable in revenge, yet capable of deep and strong affection. Diogenes had launched attacks, as Moles details, on a wide range of targets: all forms of convention, marriage, family, politics, the city, all social, sexual and racial distinctions, worldly reputation, wealth, power and authority, literature, music, and all forms of intellectual speculation.