The Satanic School was a name applied by Robert Southey to a class of writers headed by Byron and Shelley, because, according to him, their productions were "characterized by a Satanic spirit of pride and audacious impiety".
The term was, therefore, initially coined in Southey's A Vision of Judgement (1821) as one of opprobrium and moral condemnation. Charles Baudelaire's poète maudit would emerge from the Byronic hero.
Thomas Carlyle responded to this new anti-hero and accused Byron and Shelley of wasting their breath in a fierce "wrangle with the devil", having "not the courage to fairly face and honestly fight him". Byron, in the materials surrounding Manfred, would suggest that these characters are not paragons of bourgeois virtues but are, rather, creatures of fire and spirit.
See also
- 1821 in poetry, the year A Vision of Judgement was published
References
Bibliography
- Metzger, Lore. "Satanic School" in Alex Preminger and T.V.F. Brogan, eds., The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. 1114.
External links
- Satanic School on Encyclopædia Britannica