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Lyric Poetry of the British Romantic Period

When Byron wrote “She Walks in Beauty” in 1814, he did so in the wake of a major revitalization of lyric poetry that had taken place among the British Romantic poets who preceded him. To be sure, lyric poetry existed prior to the Romantics. Any poem with a speaker who expresses their inner state of mind can be classified as a lyric. However, Romantics like William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge brought renewed attention to the form at the end of the eighteenth century. The key text here is the preface Wordsworth wrote for a collection of poetry he assembled collaboratively with Coleridge, titled Lyrical Ballads. In his preface, Wordsworth rejected the elevated diction of neoclassical poetry and argued in favor of simpler, more natural language that is “really used by men,” and which can better represent “incidents and situations from common life.” Wordsworth modeled this more rustic lyric form in poems like “Tintern Abbey” (1798). In “She Walks in Beauty,” Byron draws on this new lyrical tradition simply by adopting a poetic form that expresses the development of his speaker’s inner state. Yet Byron also refutes the new tradition by retaining a preoccupation with aesthetic and philosophical abstraction.

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