The practice, which has lately been introduced into literature, of writing very long notes upon very indifferent verses, appears to me a rather happy invention for it supplies us with a mode of turning stupid poetry to account and, as horses too dull for the saddle may serve to draw lumber, so Poems of this kind make excellent beasts of burden, and will bear notes, though they may not bear reading. (Shelley, Letters 2: 183–84)īyron’s friend Thomas Moore – himself an avid self-annotator 2 – makes fun of the fashion in the preface to his (heavily annotated) poems Corruption and Intolerance (cf. And then you have Moore & Lord Byron on your side, who being much better & more successful poets than I am, may be supposed to know better the road to success, than one who has sought & missed it. But this practice, though foreign to that of the great Poets of former times, is so highly admired by our contemporaries that I can hardly counsel you to dissent. Strictly, I imagine, every expression in a poem ought to be in itself an intelligible picture. He only general error, if it be such, in your Poem, seems to me to be the employment of Indian words, in the body of the piece, & the relegation of their meaning to the notes.

In a letter to Thomas Medwin, he tells him that Shelley, who (except for Queen Mab) usually left his works unannotated, was rather critical of the practice but nevertheless recognised the contemporary vogue for self-annotation. With regard to the illustrations of my larger poems, I am glad you think of them, because such things are now become so customary that the poet who goes without them might seem to hold but a low place in public opinion. For example, Robert Southey remarks in a letter to his publisher: 1 Byron was by no means the only writer to comment on the prevalence of authorial notes around 1800. What sounds like an overstatement is, in fact, rather close to the truth: in the Romantic age, literary self-annotations were nearly ubiquitous – not only in poetry but, albeit to a lesser extent, also in prose and drama (cf. In a letter to Robert Charles Dallas on 15 September 1811, Byron facetiously calls annotations the “modern indispensables” of rhyme ( BLJ 2: 99). 3.1 Byron’s Self-Annotations in Context: The Golden Age of Self-Annotation

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