The Poet as a Volcano: The Case of Byron
The Poet as a Volcano: The Case of Byron

Summary/Abstract: One of the most memorable metaphors depicting Byron’s poetic process comes from his 1813 letter to Annabella Millbanke, where he refers to poetry as ‘the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earthquake’. As Susan Wolfson has noted (Romantic Interactions 278–280), volcanic imagery also frequently appeared in the early nineteenth-century writings on Byron even before Byron’s self-reflexive image became generally known, and this can be linked to the recurrence of volcanic tropes in Byron’s poetry. A closer examination of the metaphorical discourse of the period, however, reveals that Byron, his admirers and his critics drew on the stockpile of images popular at the time. This article proposes to examine some of metamorphoses of this imagery from its appearance in Byron’s writings to the image of Byron’s poetry not as “the lava of the imagination” but the lava of the turbulent turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Mickiewicz’s essay on Byron and Goethe.

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