This essay discusses immediate, or “erotic,” aesthetic agency, the first of several stages of the figure of the aesthete in Either/Or. Erotic aesthetic agency consists in an almost naïve, all but nonpurposive pursuit of occasions to exercise the power to overwhelm the wills of others in one’s sheer desire of them, to incorporate them in one’s own terms by operation of simple impulse. The effect of this agency on others is to subject them to desire as such, that is, to desire as a force that binds them to the Don. But the ultimate aim of the agency is its existence: that it be. The conceptual structure of Kierkegaard’s understanding of this starting point in the aesthetic view of the world, as it is presented by a self-professed fictional aesthete, is explored with reference to the figure that organizes much of the portrayal of the erotic aesthete, Don Juan, as he appears in Mozart and Da Ponte’s opera Don Giovanni. Special attention is paid both to details of the opera as Kierkegaard would have experienced it and to the slippage between a reflective aesthete, A, imagining an unreflective aesthete, the Don, as an ideal.

This chapter examines how Byron draws attention to the material forms in which his works are mediated, beginning with Beppo, which ends because ‘My pen is at the bottom of a page’. It suggests that, in the artistic process of composition, Byron pondered questions that have concerned later critics and theorists from Walter Greg and F. W. Bateson to René Wellek and Nelson Goodman. By attending to the ways in which Byron marked his manuscript page, the chapter suggests that he thought of the literary work as having a distinctive, layered ontology. It situates his implied understanding of the nature of the literary work in relation to that of recent textual scholars such as John Bryant, Peter Shillingsburg, Jack Stillinger, and Paul Eggert. Byron wrote with a keen attention to the materiality of pens, ink, and paper, but he was also well aware that his poems could become mass-produced printed commodities. He was therefore concerned with how remediation changed the effect of a poem, and even its meaning, as effects specific to manuscript did not translate into print. Beppo provides a case in point, as it imagines itself as script, print, and voice by turns, or sometimes all at once.

The chapter looks backwards to Sterne's Tristram Shandy and forwards to Joyce's Ulysses to locate Byron's avant-garde forms of allusion. Byron's deployment of local little narratives against big inhuman systems in Mazeppa, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, and Don Juan is examined as a mode of political resistance and personal poetic integrity.

This chapter discusses Canto III of Childe Harold and Manfred as marking a turning point in Byron’s writing career. Together, these two works detached Byron from the tragic universe of the Tales and pointed him towards the comic world of Don Juan. Childe Harold III turns from exploring the devastating trauma of painful memory – the Byronic Hero’s, the poet’s and post-Napoleonic Europe’s – to a quest for ways of forgetting pain through the imagination and communing with the natural world. Through these it finds a path into renewed, and new forms of, vitality, though these ultimately prove temporary and the return to the memory of pain inevitable. However, Manfred takes up Childe Harold III’s quest to discover the power of memory itself to console, comfort and revitalise. The result is a new, self-conscious, wilful, and appreciative acquiescence in the flow, and contrary flowings, of his own consciousness – indeed, his existence per se – even as he approaches his death. This prepares the way for Don Juan’s wholesale embrace of the spontaneous vitality, but also impermanence, of all human impulse(s) – an embrace that is fundamental to Byron’s comic vision.

The book concludes with a chapter that links my argument to the poetic theory and epic practice of the canonical Romantics. Situating Wordsworth’s Prelude and Byron’s Don Juan in the epic revival reveals how they participate in the trends of the period by addressing the tensions of the evangelical turn of empire. The Prelude elaborates the tradition of epic poetry that broadly affirms assumptions of British imperialism while resisting and seeking to temper its worst aspects. Don Jua, on the other hand, may be read as an extension of more subversive uses of the epic genre, attempting oppose imperialism – or at least many of its forms – by decrying the very idea of transforming others. Yet in Byron’s rejection of conversion, and in his embrace of a subjectivity made thinkable by the increasing secularization of the world, he offers an alternate path for reclaiming a sense of wholeness, one grounded in doubt and critical thought.

The point of departure of Byron’s verse is the prevalence of “Cant” in society. Deploying a “mental net” poetics of ruthless sympathy toward its audience, the poetry sets out to test its readers’ intelligence and attention. The method is initially illustrated through a close reading of a notable passage in The Giaour.

While written in the 1790s, Wordsworth’s Peter Bell was only published in 1819 as part of his effort to contest the dominance of Scott and Byron in narrative poetry. As contemporary responses make clear, the poem could be read as a rebuke to Byron’s celebration of villain-heroes: what came to be known as Byronic heroes, morally mixed but charismatic men. Wordsworth’s earlier participation in a collective satire on Byron suggests how Peter Bell responds to Byron and helps make sense of the ways in which Byron, Shelley, and Hunt saw the poem as a rejection of their ongoing work. While Wordsworth offered the poem as an example of the ways in which natural experiences can lead to spiritual reform, his turn to a Methodist preacher at the climax of the poem enraged his younger contemporaries, who saw Methodism as a key force in reactionary culture. In Shelley’s The Witch of Atlas and Peter Bell the Third, in Byron’s Don Juan, and in satires and reviews of Peter Bell and related works by Keats, Reynolds, and Hunt we see a collective attempt by the Cockney School to answer the challenge they heard in Peter Bell.