long passage in vindication of Pope and in denunciation of contemporary
poetry--a passage which is important not only as showing Byron's
opinions, but as testifying to the very general change in taste which had
taken place since 1756, when Joseph Warton was so discouraged by the
public hostility to his "Essay on Pope" that he withheld the second
volume for twenty-six years. "The great cause of the present deplorable
state of English poetry," writes Byron, "is to be attributed to that
absurd and systematic depreciation of Pope in which, for the last few
years, there has been a kind of epidemical concurrence. Men of the most
opposite opinions have united upon this topic." He then goes on to
praise Pope and abuse his own contemporaries, especially the Lake poets,
both in the most extravagant terms. Pope he pronounces the most perfect
and harmonious of poets. "Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge," he says,
"had all of them a very natural antipathy to Pope . . . but they have
been joined in it by . . . the whole heterogeneous mass of living English
poets excepting Crabbe, Rogers, Gifford, and Campbell, who, both by
precept and practice, have proved their adherence; and by me, who have
shamefully deviated in practice, but have ever loved and honoured Pope's
poetry with my whole soul." There is ten times more poetry, he thinks,
in the "Essay on Man" than in the "Excursion"; and if you want passion,
where is to be found stronger than in the "Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard"?
To the sneer that Pope is only the "poet of reason" Byron replies that he
will undertake to find more lines teeming with _imagination_ in Pope than
in any two living poets. "In the mean time," he asks, "what have we got
instead? . . . The Lake school," and "a deluge of flimsy and
unintelligible romances imitated from Scott and myself." He prophesies
that all except the classical poets, Crabbe, Rogers, and Campbell, will
survive their reputation, acknowledges that his own practice as a poet is
not in harmony with his principles, and says; "I told Moore not very long
ago, 'We are all wrong except Rogers, Crabbe, and Campbell.'" In the