The nineteenth-century poet Lord Byron, for instance, claimed to have once received a letter reporting that "the French had caught the contagion of
Byronism to the highest pitch" (qtd.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge esteemed Dante's "combination of poetry with doctrine, which is one of the characteristics of Christian poetry." Thomas Carlyle pronounced Dante "world-deep" and deplored the Romantic vogue for the Inferno at the expense of the other canticles, attributing it to "our general
Byronism of taste, [which] is like to be a transient feeling." (It was not, at least where the Inferno is concerned.) And the arch-Romantic Percy Bysshe Shelley also defied the taste of his age, and of our own, declaring the Purgatorio superior to the Inferno and the Paradiso most excellent of all.
Swinburne might be considered the embodiment of two different elements of British Philhellenism: the legacy of early-nineteenth century
Byronism and the advocacy of liberal principles.
However, during the Easter of 1824, when he died at Missolonghi, one resurrection, that is empirically verifiable, did take place: "that monster known as
Byronism" rose from Byron's corpse and began to live a life of its own (Eisler 752).
He was caricatured as a dandy in contemporary circles, who according to Daniels and O'Kane combined "louche Tory
Byronism with the volubility of the aristocratic stage Irishman!" (42).
He has taught courses in English and European Romanticism, Byron and
Byronism, Keats and His Circle, Children's Literature, and C.S.
The Female Romantics: Nineteenth-Century Women Novelists and
Byronism. New York: Routledge, 2013.
Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that the example of certain Byronic heroes, in addition to influencing the way in which Octave desponds and despairs generally, also suggested how he might adjust to his hidden sexual problem: the suppressed violence, the solitariness, the glacial reserve, and the contempt for and resistance to love which characterize these heroes were so many Romantic trappings in which it was all too easy for Stendhal to veil Octave's malady (Rosa, "
Byronism" 799-805).
The later version of the scene--moonlit, crepuscular, gauzy--is moody almost to the point of
Byronism. It echoes, in fact, certain lines from The Corsair (1814):