Thank you to the TLS and Seamus Perry for the recent review.
Excerpt here:
"Coincidentally, a welcome book of essays by Bernard Beatty
has just appeared, which makes its own case for the “dark
poems”, and it arrives with a generous preface of tribute by
McGann himself. The scholars make common cause in their
love of Byron, but actually, as Beatty notes, they see rather
different things to praise. McGann describes a writer with
the modern, secular sensibility of an ironist living in a
contingent world, a sort of poetical Richard Rorty; Beatty is
intent on tracing in the poems what he calls a “Catholic
trajectory”, a learning curve that takes Byron deeper and
deeper into the recesses of the human soul. He offers,
among other things, compelling accounts of “the darkness of
sin” in “Lara” and the unexpected orthodoxy of Byron’s
play Cain, usually characterized as a sceptic’s charter.
"Beatty writes throughout with enviable lucidity and
expository grace, while allowing himself a few moments of
the senior clubman. (Immanuel Kant appears at one point
as “our old unorthodox friend from Königsberg”.) He
concedes that Byron does have an “enlightenment” side,
and does not pretend to claim that, whatever appreciative
noises he might make about Italian Catholicism, the poet
ever came close to faith: it might seem the worst of both
worlds to have arrived at “a Christian diagnosis” without
grasping “the Christian salve that it indicates”. Ellis,
meanwhile, highlights his instinctive resistance to the
doctrine of vicarious atonement through Christ’s sacrifice,
which, thought Byron, drawing on a homely comparison, “no
more does away with man’s guilt than a schoolboy
volunteering to be flogged for another would exculpate the
dunce from negligence, or preserve him from the rod”. That
strikes a robustly “enlightenment” note; but Beatty allows for
the presence of alternative readings, and, nicely, he deploys
Byronic parentheses to do so: “what I would call Byron’s
Catholic trajectory (not of course his only trajectory)”.
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