Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on texts
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Byron and the poetics of digression
- 1 ‘Scorching and drenching’: discourses of digression among Byron's readers
- 2 ‘Breaches in transition’: eighteenth-century digressions and Byron's early verse
- 3 Erring with Pope: Hints from Horace and the trouble with decency
- 4 Uncertain blisses: Don Juan, digressive intertextuality and the risks of reception
- 5 ‘The worst of sinning’: Don Juan, moral England and feminine caprice
- 6 ‘Between carelessness and trouble’: Byron's last digressions
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - Erring with Pope: Hints from Horace and the trouble with decency
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on texts
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Byron and the poetics of digression
- 1 ‘Scorching and drenching’: discourses of digression among Byron's readers
- 2 ‘Breaches in transition’: eighteenth-century digressions and Byron's early verse
- 3 Erring with Pope: Hints from Horace and the trouble with decency
- 4 Uncertain blisses: Don Juan, digressive intertextuality and the risks of reception
- 5 ‘The worst of sinning’: Don Juan, moral England and feminine caprice
- 6 ‘Between carelessness and trouble’: Byron's last digressions
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
When Byron was accused of violating canons of correctness, his critics usually suggested that he erred from classical aesthetic ideals. Throughout the eighteenth century Horatian criticism had represented a cultural force opposed to forms of digression. A review of Tristram Shandy in the Journal Encyclopédique of 15 April 1760 warned:
This is Horace's monster … The author has neither plan nor principles, nor system: he only wishes to talk on and unfortunately one listens to him with pleasure … Moreover, that irregular progression of ideas, so far removed from the spirit of this age, passes for intentional subtlety. The English find mystery in it and all join in admiring it.
Sterne himself genuflected to this critical orthodoxy when he wrote to an early reader of the manuscript of volumes i and ii of Tristram Shandy: ‘I like Your Caution of the Ambitiosa recidet ornamenta – as I revise My book, I will shrive My conscience upon that sin.’ His offer to cut away ‘sinful’ superfluity acknowledges – albeit wryly – the traditional association between digression and transgression. Like Sterne, Byron's respect for Horatian standards of correctness coexisted with the composition of a work which defied those notions. This chapter examines the ways in which conflicting notions of decorum in private and public contexts affect the texture, and therefore the meaning, of Byron's poetry.
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- Information
- Byron, Poetics and History , pp. 73 - 105Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002