The Politics of Paradise: A Vindication of Byron

by Michael Foot

Distinguished British parliamentarian & former leader of the Labour Party Foot has written a splendid book that presents Byron as a true "poet of the revolution," a man of great courage & imagination who never wavered from his ideals of freedom & his hatred of the twin evils of war & orthodox religion. Foot's Byron is thus an important counterbalance to the Byron offered by Malcolm Kelsall's Byron's Politics (Barnes & Noble, 1987), a conservative aristocrat who achieved nothing for political reform. Foot includes much lengthy quotation from the poems & letters & some helpful bibliographic commentary. Above all, he writes with such eloquence & authority, & such an obvious love of his subject, that this book will be enjoyed by general reader & specialist alike.--Bryan Aubrey, Fairfield, IA

425 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Michael Mackintosh Foot was an English Labour politician and writer, who was a Member of Parliament from 1945 to 1992, and was the Leader of the Opposition from 1980 to 1983.

Reviews

[Paul]

3.5 stars
The Politics of Paradise
“The dead have been awakened – Shall I sleep?”
The world’s at war with tyrants – shall I crouch?
The harvest’s ripe – and shall I pause to reap?
I slumber not; the thorn is in my couch;
Each day a trumpet soundeth in mine ear
It’s echo in my heart …”

The first thing to say is that this is not a biography of Byron. It is an examination of his political and religious views and also his interactions with printers and critics.
The author is Michael Foot, former leader of the Labour Party from 1979 to 1983: its most left wing leader until Jeremy Corbyn. Foot was clearly passionate about Byron and it comes through in this work. There is also a great deal about William Hazlitt, an essayist and critic who reviewed Byron’s work.
Foot takes the reader through Byron’s politics and the relationship with his poetry. As an aside, there is a transcript of Byron’s maiden speech to the House of Lords. It is at the height of the Luddite disturbances and is a defence of the frame workers in Nottingham, close to where Byron lived. Foot tries to convince that Byron was a radical as Shelley. I wasn’t entirely convinced by the argument. Byron certainly became heavily involved in the independence movements in Italy and Greece, where he is remembered today.
Foot avoids some of Byron’s complexities: his bisexuality and relationships with women amongst others. He does go through Byron’s primary poems Childe Harold, Cain Don Juan (or Donny Jonny as Byron referred to it). It is interesting, but is really for Byron fanatics (I am not one of them) because of the depth and complexity of the analysis. Foot did a great deal of research. If you want to know more about Byron’s views and get into some of the academic debates, this is for you. Not really for me.

[Erik Graff · Rating 2 out of 5]

I purchased this book years ago owing to an abiding interest in its author, Michael Foot, one-time left-wing leader of the British Labour Party. More recently, owing to a number of friendships with young poets, I've been reading a number of biographies of British poets and literary figures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as well as some histories of the period. Having done Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake and Wollstonecraft, I figured it was time to move on to Byron, Keats and Shelley. Not having a biography of Shelley to hand, and finding the Keats biography in the shelves rather too daunting, I continued on to Foot's book on Byron.

For me, it was a bad choice because Foot did not write a biography. Rather, this is a specialized treatment focused on Byron's political and religious beliefs, an answer to other authors who have, in Foot's opinion, misrepresented his hero. Such a treatment would probably be of interest to someone more familiar with the debate, but the argument was pretty much lost to me.

Similarly, a reader familiar with the essayist William Hazlitt might also find this treatment of great interest as Foot begins and ends the work with reference to him, Hazlitt being, he argues, an example of a critic who, while originally mistaking Byron, finally came to appreciate the poet's politics.

Finally, any student of Michael Foot himself might find this book engrossing. It is not often that one with such an knowledgeable appreciation of poetics rising as high as Foot did in contemporary politics. I, for one, can only come up with former Senator Eugene J. McCarthy as even remotely comparable.