Byron, Milton and the Two Reasons

The most significant example of the blind to be found in Byron is that of Milton, ‘the blind Old Man’. To contemplate the meaning of this figure for Byron is to understand something essential to him, something which lays bare the complexity of the links between the aesthetic and the political in his work. The most illuminating point of entry to this question is by way of the collocation of Milton, Dryden and Pope in Don Juan. In this context, they function as repositories of classical value, opposed to the poetics of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey. But Milton sits oddly with the other two, both politically and aesthetically. However, before addressing this issue, it will be useful to consider yet again the question of Byron's classicism. In particular, the conception of classical reason is revealing of a fertile contradiction in his work.

There are, roughly speaking, two reasons in Byron. Both have political implications; both are conceived as possessing classical sanction. Put this simply the formula might sound misleading, as if it were offering as much as a similar distinction might offer in a discussion of, say, Coleridge: something about Ralph Cudworth as opposed to Joseph Priestley, perhaps. Whereas I intend my distinction to refer only to what I shall call respectively Augustan Reason and Enlightenment Reason – referring, by the former, to the age of Dryden and Pope, and not to that of Maecenas and Horace.