“Broken, Wild, Untold Tales: Byron’s Orientalist Poetry and Romantic-Period Verse Narrative”

It is well known that, in the early 1810s, Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and his ‘Oriental tales’ took the field of narrative verse by storm. In turn, Walter Scott, who had reaped huge success with The Lay of the Last Minstrel and Marmion, turned his attention to prose, whereas other authors adopted and reworked Byron’s model in order to develop their own versions of the ‘metrical tale’. This chapter examines some aspects of this conversation and its outcomes. It begins with a quick reconsideration of Byron’s de-structuring and recomposition of the metrical tale through a reorganization of the relationship between romance and epic, new forms of narrating identity, and new ways of representing desire. This opening section also explores how Byron’s reconfiguration of the Romantic-period verse narrative lies also in his focus on exotic settings and civilizations, as their otherness contributed to his ‘othering’ of the genre. The chapter then turns to analyze a representative selection of verse narratives from the late 1810s to the mid-1820s that engaged with Byron’s model in original ways: Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh (1817), Felicia Hemans’s The Abencerrage (1819) and Letitia Elizabeth Landon’s The Troubadour (1825). Working both with and against Byron’s metrical tales, these authors established a conversation with him that throws light on the new possibilities of narrating identity and desire, history, geography and culture inaugurated by his generic remaking. By this token, they confirm Byron’s lasting impact on a literary form that continued to exert a powerful hold on readers until the end of the nineteenth century.