Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-wq484 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-27T20:59:37.601Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 5 - ‘Liquid Lines’: Byron Among the Amatory Poets

from Part I - Inheritances

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 July 2021

Clare Bucknell
Affiliation:
All Souls College, Oxford
Matthew Ward
Affiliation:
University of Birmingham
Get access

Summary

An 1809 pen and ink caricature sketch by Scrope Berdmore Davies depicts ‘Ld B. as an Amatory Writer’. It is one of a group of four head-and-shoulders sketches, in profile, that includes their mutual Cambridge friends John Cam Hobhouse and Charles Skinner Matthews, depicted as ‘Two Authors of the Satirical Miscellany’, and a fourth figure, ‘The Satirist’ – possibly Davies himself, but more likely Hewson Clarke, a Cambridge enemy who had criticized Byron’s first published volume Hours of Idleness (1807) in The Satirist.2 But the ‘Satirist’ could also be Byron, for the poetic identity of ‘satirist’ had replaced that of ‘amatory writer’ with the publication of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers in March 1809. Coinciding with Byron’s first trip to Greece, which took place after the publication of English Bards, Davies made the sketch on the back of a letter he sent to Byron in June 1809, when Byron and Hobhouse were in Falmouth, waiting to sail for the Eastern Mediterranean. In its counterpointing of Byron as an amatory poet against the satirist, Davies’ sketch commemorates Byron’s turn from the amatory to the ‘Satirist’ style.

Type
Chapter
Information
Byron Among the English Poets
Literary Tradition and Poetic Legacy
, pp. 84 - 99
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×