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Any Mortal Thing


‘“Poesy” may be merely a “straw”, a “paper kite”, a “shadow”, and a “bubble”, but its very lightness and fragility, so Byron’s buoyant sweep contends, make it a peculiarly sensitive register of our existential lot’ (Michael O’Neill, Romanticism and the Self-Conscious Poem). In its strenuous engagement with the agency of poetic form, Michael O’Neill’s work illuminates Byron’s ‘buoyant sweep’ of the hefty existential questions that imprint our ‘bonds of clay’ (‘[Epistle to Augusta]’, 30) and of the mixed and mobile emotional repertoire that is the lot of ‘any mortal thing’ (Don Juan, IV, 4). This essay seeks to respond to O’Neill’s superb illumination of the agency of poetic form, and of how the deployment of Byronic form is always grounded in emotion.