From Public Hero to Poet-Hero

Abstract

The Romantic era was a rethink of the English heroism: a transformation of the traditional, civic, action-oriented hero of the classical and neoclassical traditions into a new model, based on inner experience, self-consciousness, and imaginative transformation. This study examines that shift through two seminal long poems of the era, William Wordsworth's The Prelude (1805/1850) and Lord Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812–1818), arguing that each poet constructs what may be termed a heroism of resistance and witness, in Byron's case, and a heroism of formation and integration, in Wordsworth's. Based on the theoretical framework of the Romantic inward turn developed by Northup Frye (Frye, 1963), the paper engages in close-reading of some passages in both poems and places them in a wider comparative framework that incorporates structural similarities with the Sufi mystical tradition. Byron and Wordsworth together explore the entire spectrum of what Romantic heroism might entail: Byron hero always leaves a world that is deprived of inherited meaning; Wordsworth hero is slowly formed by the memory, nature and imaginative perception. Both movements are a redefinition of the heroic subject that is among the most significant literary legacies of English Romanticism.