Inspired by T S Eliot's Essay on Byron

I have just finished reading Eliot's essay on Byron. I hadn't read this one before and he was remarkably reasonable. I would have to agree that much of the shorter work alone would not have made Byron's reputation and it is the story telling and satire of the longer works that justify his standing along with Shelley, Keats et al as a great poet. That is not to say that the shorter work is entirely without merit, there are some extraordinary poems within that body of work: The Destruction of Sennacherib is but one example. Nonetheless, such poems are isolated jewels within an ice bucket of less gifted work.

The beauty of Byron's narrative poems is that they are so readable. No doubt one of the reasons that there are so few questions regarding Byron in poetry forums is that his work is not obscure, it is not full of hidden (or potentially hidden) meaning, not moralistic but is outstandingly clear. Don Juan, and Childe Harold to a lesser degree, provide almost a social history of his time. It would be hard to gain a real understanding of such things from Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley. Perhaps from Blake, but you have to know where to look and how to unlock the secrets.

Byron was a populist. It is possible to sit and read Don Juan steadily. It is not possible, I believe, to read The Four Zoas in this way. Byron was relevant to his times and that relevance remains an important part of his work today. Blake we may argue about for eternity but from Byron we learn history. This is not to say that Blake is not worth the struggle, he clearly is but at best our thoughts are conjecture. It is possible to argue that poetry, indeed art generally, should be mind stretching and so Blake repays more than Byron. In a limited way this is true, but art should also be attractive: to have starting points to pull people in who may then learn to enjoy more complex pieces. This, in my view, is one of the problems with the way that poetry is taught currently. The lures are left out and so poetry is considered 'difficult'. This should not be considered surprising if the first serious subject is Blake, for example.

Poetry, and thus art generally, should not be exclusive. It is right that there should be degrees of complexity, but not complexity for its own sake and not to elevate the difficult and complex over the simple but to celebrate both.