Byron and Romantic Concepts of Inspiration

Abstract

Though treated marginally in histories of philosophy and criticism, Byron was deeply involved in Romantic-Period controversies. In that post-Enlightenment, science-orientated age, the Platonic-Romantic concept of inspiration as divine afflatus linking the prophet-priest-poet with the ideal world beyond was no longer tenable without an admixture of doubt that turned religion into myth. As a seriously-minded Romantic sceptic in the Pyrrhonian tradition and commuter between the genres of sensibility and satire, Byron often refers to the prophet-poet concept, acting it out in pre-Decadent poses of inspiration, yet undercutting it with his typical Romantic Irony. In contrast to Goethe, who insisted on an inspired poet's sanity, he saw inspiration both as a social distinction and as a pathological norm deviation. The more imaginative and poetical the creation, the more insane is the poet's mind; the more realistic and prosaic, the more compos it is, though an active poet is never quite sane in the sense of Coleridge's ‘depression’, meaning his non-visitation by his ‘shaping spirit of imagination’.