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• Title: Transgressing the Borders of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (Critical Essay)
• Author : Studies in Romanticism
• Release Date : January 22, 2008
• Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 207 KB

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WHEN BYRON ADDED HIS NAME TO THE SECOND EDITION OF ENGLISH Bards and Scotch Reviewers in May 1809, he also appended a lengthy postscript further justifying his attack on the Edinburgh critics. At one point in the postscript, Byron associates his satire with transgression: "Since the publication of this thing, my name has not been concealed; I have been mostly in London, ready to answer for my transgressions." (1) The word "transgression" here carries multiple meanings. In one sense, Byron realizes that EBSR, with its direct censure of many respected literary and political personages such as Francis Jeffrey and Lord Holland, has come to be seen as a social transgression. At the same time, "transgression" can denote physical movement, a stepping across an established boundary, and Byron's attention to place, "mostly in London," suggests that he has this alternative meaning of the word in mind. In fact, elsewhere in the postscript he defends his imminent departure for Lisbon, a move which he fears might be misconstrued by his critics: "It may be said that I quit England because I have censured there 'persons of honour and wit about town', but I am coming back again, and their vengeance will keep hot till my return. Those who know me can testify that my motives for leaving England are very different from fears, literary or personal; those who do not, may one day be convinced" (postscript 19-24). (2) Byron's movements, or "transgressions," within the text of EBSR, however, are more ambivalent than those discussed in the Postscript. Although he mocks English and especially Scottish culture in the poem, his anti-Scottish stance was an afterthought. Byron conceived the poem in 1807 as a satire on contemporary British writers under the abbreviated title British Bards, but began redrafting the poem after Henry Brougham's scathing review of Hours of Idleness appeared in the pages of the Edinburgh Review in January 1808. (3) Discouraged, yet defiant, Byron added long sections on the Edinburgh critics and gave the poem its more familiar title: English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. The new title and direction for the poem represented a cultural as well as a personal renegotiation for Byron, who would use EBSR to question his Scottish roots rather than romanticize his memories of the Highland regions where in his youth he once "rove[d] a careless mountaineer." (4) And while some critical attention has been given to Byron's attitude toward his Scottish identity in the poem, most critics maintain that Byron either rejects his Scottish roots altogether and becomes "wholly English" (5) or they simply dismiss his satire as rash and immature, as Byron himself would later declare. (6) In the poem, I suggest, Byron's sense of cultural as well as personal topography--his connections with both England and Scotland and English and Scottish literary traditions--are more complicated than have been previously acknowledged and mark the beginnings of the cosmopolitanism that he would later embrace in his life and verse. I will show that throughout EBSR Byron demarcates the literary transgressions of Britain's bards while simultaneously setting, negotiating, and ultimately transgressing the geographic and cultural boundaries that tie him to both England and Scotland.

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