Byron and the ‘Spanish Patriots'

As all Byron students know, Joseph Blacket would not have passed into posterity were it not for the brilliant, albeit rather cruel, ‘Epitaph’ that the young Lord wrote in memory of the ‘late poet and shoemaker’ of that name. But, curiously, both Blacket and Byron had romanticized the bloody siege of Zaragoza in Spain soon after the event: the first in ‘The Fall of Saragossa’, a poem of some 150 lines published as part of his Specimens, and the second in the ‘Spanish maid’ stanzas of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. ¹ Byron, an aristocrat, a Whig sympathizer and a gifted poet; and Blacket, a working-class man, a Tory sympathizer, and a poetaster: how can such disparate characters be attracted by the same poetical subject? The only possible answer lies in the fact that the Peninsular War, a major episode of British political and military intervention abroad, had quickly become one of the favourite topoi among British contemporary writers, and this was a feature not only of works by those we now call major Romantic poets but also of a substantial number of books of poems written by authors who enjoyed popularity in their time but were later forgotten. To this must be added the work of a host of anonymous readers who sent in to the newspapers their occasional verses on the war.