Perhaps no work of Byron’s is more relentlessly challenging to a reader’s understanding than Manfred. The poem’s most notorious biographical resonance – the “real-world” identity of Astarte – indexes its striking array of provocative or enigmatic passages that force readers to a troubled sympathy with Manfred’s tormented mind and world. At the same time, the “medley style” of the work, mixing the poetics of dark Romanticism with unexpected satiric and farcical turns, initiated Byron’s breakthrough into poetic practices of unusual, even shocking, technical range and expressive virtuosity.

From 1809 to 1816 Byron used his own life experiences, not least their failures and spectacular self-deceptions, to draw up an insidious contract with a readership of secret sharers. Byron learned from Pope how to fashion an array of disturbing verse practices – implicitly addressed to a social order of “The mad, the bad, the useless, and the base” – that called readers to demanding acts of attention and self-attention. The poetry of 1809–1816 unfolds a wide range of “perversifications” to expose the airbrushed language of a canting world, with The Siege of Corinth being the culminating poetic act of dark revelation.

Keying off Thomas Moore’s assessment of Romanticism as “mannerist” and Byron’s exploration of his own “medley style” in Manfred, Byron once again used Pope’s performative poetics to take a critical measure of the dominant verse practices of his period. Reflecting on the extreme subjectivity of Romantic styles of expression, Byron argued that the highly subjective Romantic revolutions of the word called all poetic and moral “norms” to a self-critical accounting. Cantos III and IV of Childe Harold took the cases of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and the French Revolution as a warning to the poets and poetry of Romantic Enlightenment. Henceforth, Byron suggested, poetic freedom would entail zero degree writing: verse would be located at the imperiled “inner standing point” – he called it “Liberty” – of a naked and uncertain address

A conspectus of contemporary negative judgments of Byron’s morals and poetry throws into relief the character of what Wilson Knight long ago called Byron’s poetry of action. Political and social issues are repeatedly drawn up as a struggle over language and the proper function of poetry in society. The first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage stage a drama of Byron’s search for a poetic address to break the spells of linguistic decorum. Two events were pivotal: the experience of hearing wild Suliote ballads, and the example of Burns’s “unpublishable” and imperishable erotic verse. The book’s account of these matters closes with a reflection on the Hebrew Melodies, where “stubborn Israel’s” histories of alienation and betrayal point to the poète maudit – and Byron – as the age’s exemplary cultural hero.

Blake’s radically Christian vision of the infidel Byron as Elijah redivivus solicits an extended comparison between their respective poetic careers as prophets against empire. Three key features of their work, each pertinent to a clearer understanding of Romanticism and its cultural legacies, made them companionable figures. First and foremost, both judged that art and poetry had a special vocation of social enlightenment. Second, both also judged the vocation to involve a root and branch critique of prevailing moral attitudes, with art and poetry missioned to deliver that critique. Finally, a shared hostility to “systematic reasoning” yielded their similar approach to poetic expression.

The “most readable poem in the language” is also one of the most gratulant acts of homage to Byron’s Mother Tongue. Framed in a critical relation to Wordsworth and Coleridge and their influential ideas about language and poetry, Don Juan makes its case by poetic example, not prose precept. The poem’s kaleidoscopic show-and-tell performance of unrestrained poetic expression unfolds to a broad demonstration of Freedom and free expression as primary social, moral, and poetic values.

The point of departure of Byron’s verse is the prevalence of “Cant” in society. Deploying a “mental net” poetics of ruthless sympathy toward its audience, the poetry sets out to test its readers’ intelligence and attention. The method is initially illustrated through a close reading of a notable passage in The Giaour.