‘I Feel the improvvisatore’: Byron, Improvisation, and Romantic Poetics

After a preliminary reconstruction of the impact and diffusion of poetic improvisation in British Romantic-period literature, this essay addresses the importance of the improvvisatore’s art in Byron’s poetical theory and practice. Although he did not devote any work to this figure, his letters and satirical writings, especially Beppo and Don Juan, present several references to it. His judgements on the Italian improvvisatori, especially the notorious Tommaso Sgricci, tend to be ambiguous, if not contradictory, as are the numerous remarks in his journals and correspondence. If, on the one hand, like Shelley, Byron celebrates the expressive force and genius of the improvising poet/actor, on the other, he criticizes the quality of the improvised texts. Many critics have employed the notion of ‘improvisation’ and its derivatives to illustrate Byron’s style, which the poet himself called his ‘desultory rhyme’ to describe his passion for digression, anti-climax, and quick tonal shifts. ‘Carelessly I sing’, Byron writes in Don Juan. Although we must bear in mind his constant tendency to self-irony, it is undeniable that the conversational quality of the comic poems he composed in Italy reveal Byron as a virtuoso of this seemingly improvised style which, as with the Italian improvvisatori of the Romantic period, aimed at involving the reader in a complex dialogic pact with the author.