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Over the last few decades, several prominent strands of criticism have encouraged us to assume that Romantic intimations of transcendence are illusions, escapist fantasies or forms of mystification. This article argues against such practices of exclusive immanence and recommends in their place a more hospitable 'post-secular' approach, which favours a non-dogmatic 'posture of perhaps'. The relevance of this alternative approach is illustrated with reference to the work of Byron, which is, I suggest, sceptical about and yet open to the possibility of religious transcendence. What's more, the article brings to light two divergent forms of openness to the religious in Byron's verse: a more reflective posture of hospitality to the paradoxical possibility of the impossible--founded on the poet's radical scepticism--and a more affective mode of openness, which discloses or disposes the poet towards that which exceeds the material. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay is concerned with the levity of Don Juan, which tends to be viewed as a form of debunking or 'de-creating' irreverence, and hence as intrinsically opposed to the religious. Against this tendency, the essay suggests firstly that levity and reverence may coexist, without the former subverting the latter, as seen in the poet's extended prayer to the Virgin Mary, which gives way to without being retroactively annulled by a gesture of flippancy. In the second place, drawing on the work of John Henry Newman, it is argued that levity is a posture that may be engendered by faith and that the intermingling of seriousness and levity - which constitutes the dominant tone of Don Juan - is 'the special characteristic of a Catholic country'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Byron has been read as an ironist and a nihilist with a 'scorn for metaphysics' (Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company). Without letting go of the poet's characteristic scepticism or aversion to systems, this article seeks to call into question such an unqualified reading, tracing in Byron's verse an 'ecstatic logic' which is pervasive and consistent, and which corresponds to traditional theological accounts of ekstasis. In considering the poet's representation of ecstatic experience, the article also draws attention to related moments of 'spiritual verticality' in his poetry, which complicate Camille Paglia's reading of Byron as a poet of 'earthly horizontality'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]