Byron’s lyrics remain largely neglected by modern scholarship. The critical attention granted to them is commensurate with the room they take up on the page: a handful of essays and the odd book chapter are all that exists on the poet’s engagement with the form. As James Soderholm quips, Byron’s lyrics are “more unheard-of than overheard.” Yet lyric composition is of great importance not only for Byron’s early poetic development, but for his whole creative life. It is the genre he returns to most consistently throughout his career. All four of his juvenilia collections – with the exception of various translations from Greek and Latin epic – consist exclusively of lyric poetry, while his final writings from Greece in 1824, including “On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year,” “A Song for the Suliotes” and “Love and Death,” are all lyric poems. Why, given Byron’s evident interest in the genre, are the lyrics overlooked? The answer is in part found in their contemporary reception: they sold less well than Byron’s blockbuster narrative poems. Perhaps his best-known lyric collection, Hebrew Melodies (1816), had sold just 6,000 copies by 1819, compared with 20,000 copies of the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812) and 25,000 copies of The Corsair (1814). Just as significant a factor is the ongoing legacy of M. H. Abrams’ essay on what he terms “the greater Romantic lyric.” Although he does not claim that the greater Romantic lyric is the only lyric mode of the Romantic period, Abrams does contend that it stands as the period’s one lyric innovation. Subsequently, despite his insistence to the contrary, it is difficult to avoid the insinuation that “greater” implies “a higher achievement than other Romantic lyrics.” With this in mind, Abrams’ claim that “Only Byron, among the major poets, did not write in this mode at all,” sounds rather a lot like “only Byron did not contribute to lyric innovation in the period.”