From "the Heightening of the Beau Ideal" to "Palpable Things": Byron, Clough and the Poetry of Experience

Drawing on Robert Langbaum’s concept of «poetry of experience», the article aims to highlight the intertextual relationships between Byron’s and Clough’s narrative poems by focusing on three interrelated aspects, each embedding a critique of Victorian attitudes on the part of Clough, including the reception of Byron and construction of Byronism. First, the two poets’ ironic stance, or their belief in historical relativism and positive scepticism, will be examined as a challenge to both Romantic idealism and the Enlightenment and Victorian belief in factual truths. Secondly, Byron’s insisting on fact over pure fiction will be regarded as an anticipation of Clough’s concern with the «palpable things» of life against abstract systems of thought and transcendental aspirations. Finally, the figurations of Italy recurring in Clough’s «Amours de Voyage» and «Dypsychus and the Spirit» and Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and «Beppo» will be analysed as emblematic moments of their poetry of experience and vehicles of their Weltanschauung.