Byron, Thomas Hood, and the Tides of Feeling

A special issue celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Byron Journal seems a fitting place to reconsider Byron’s influence on his near contemporaries. In this essay, I draw together two elements strongly associated with his literary life and vital to his legacy – the sea and poetic feeling – and explore their resonance in the seascapes of Thomas Hood. For both poets the sea was a lifetime obsession, a way of discovering and re-evaluating oneself and others, of reflecting on the ebb and flow of life and literature, of what lasts and what drifts away. In their writing, the motion of the sea is a means of emulating or evaluating intense, overwhelming emotion, but it might also become a way of temporarily washing away feelings through comedy. Inspired by the sea, both poets had a keen sense of how language, too, is mutable and capricious. Seas encourage thoughts of metamorphosis, and literary devices like allusion, echo, and imitation are similarly forms of transformation. In this essay on the intersections between major and minor poets, then, Hood’s poetry runs along the shoreline of Byron’s boundless ocean.