The first two – easily ignored – words here are important. To understand Byron as a thinker we need to pay close attention not just to his direct philosophical claims, but to the self–conscious forming of his articulations. ‘In short’ is more than throat clearing because it acknowledges the fragmentary relation of the utterance to the eternity of thought in which it participates. Something of this is also recognized in the form of the claim itself which acknowledges the intellectual force of scepticism but also the possibilities that attend scepticism's self–cancellation. Doubt is an encompassing inevitability for the thoughtful life, yet its very thoroughness offers to conjure us away from its apparent entrapment. This moment, in which for Byron philosophy (‘she too much rejects’) and truth part ways, is, as this book has argued, the opening act of Byronic poetics. Writing, for Byron, whether prose literary criticism or visionary poetry, must understand its own compacted provisionality in the face of what it cannot hope to capture. What is written is only a miniature or outline or sketch of what writing acknowledges. This shortfall is refigured as hope in the person of a reader who, during Byron's post–John Murray years, is both invested in and mistrusted to an unprecedented extent. Where poetic agency in these terms is seen to be misunderstood or misappropriated, Byron turns the logic of vision to the purposes of satire. ‘Lake School’ sublimity is for Byron a mock–up, something claimed by the author rather than offered to the reader. It misconstrues the sublime by failing to reach a poetics of the concrete. ‘Cant Poetical’ and ‘Cant Political’ being closely linked for Byron, the problem is reformulated, in the siege cantos of Don Juan and elsewhere, as one of political dishonesty. The corrupt historian's failure to acknowledge the relation between narrative and world is an act of moral violence that is also a desecration of the poet's obligation to see.

Across these negotiations, the visionary tradition permeates and is transmuted through Byron's thought, connecting up the poet's Romantic durability with his energies as a literary critic, satirist and political commentator.