Report: “Byron: A Life in Motion”
By Emma Watkins, K-SAA Communications Fellow
Few literary figures have a mythos quite as vast as the poet George Gordon Byron, more commonly known as Lord Byron (1788–1824). Often called a “young man’s poet,” Byron has captured generations of readers. In fact, for me, reading my dad’s well-loved dilapidated but gorgeous copy of Byron’s Works eventually led me to want to study the Romantic era. After slightly abandoning Byron in undergrad, attending the Byron: A Life in Motion exhibition at the New York Public Library brought me right back to that initial fascination. Focused on Byron’s travels and the people he shared them with (and the ones he abandoned along the way), Byron: A Life in Motion charts Byron’s life from his childhood in Aberdeen to his death in Messolonghi and where scholars and enthusiasts have taken his work since his death.
What really makes this exhibition shine is the voice of the curator throughout the exhibition text. The wit injected into the exhibition text by Elizabeth Denlinger, curator of the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle at The New York Public Library, provides insightful commentary while using humor to bring the poet to life for people approaching him for the first time and seasoned Byronists alike. Denlinger’s knowledge of and admiration for the poet are displayed through snark and knowing remarks about the many contradictions in Byron’s life, personality, and work, as well as through showing care by providing ample context for people unfamiliar with the poet. It doesn’t hurt that the exhibition is also beautiful to look at—Denlinger praises the designers for making Byron: A Life in Motion so visually compelling.
The exhibition is organized chronologically, and, due to the geographically varied course of Byron’s life, by place. Viewers are guided through the exhibition beginning with “Youth” and “Fame and Marriage” before visiting objects from the poet’s time in Switzerland, Venice, Ravenna, Pisa and Genoa, and Greece, before arriving at a collection relating to his “Posthumous Fame.” Denlinger explained that this overarching theme of mobility and mutability emerged from both her prior knowledge of Byron’s life and from looking through the objects. She summed up the theme of mobility through a canto from Don Juan that is written on one of the panels in the exhibition:
Some doubt how much of Adeline was real;
So well she acted—all and every part
By turns—with that vivacious versatility
Which many people take for want of heart;
They err; ‘tis merely what is called Mobility,
A thing of temperament and not of Art,
Though seeming so, from its supposed facility;
And false—though true; for surely they’re sincerest
Who are strongly acted on by what is nearest.
- Don Juan, Canto 16
Denlinger began working with Romantic-era writing by studying Blake in college, and later through her dissertation on Mary Wollstonecraft. After deciding against teaching, Denlinger contributed fact-checking, copy editing, and research to the last four volumes of Shelley and his Circle (Harvard UP, 1961–2024). Her first, and largest, experience curating an exhibition was Before Victoria: Extraordinary Women of the British Romantic Era (which, to give an idea of the size, was held in the NYPL’s Gottesman Hall, where the Treasures exhibition currently lives), which led her to choose a rare book and manuscript program for her library degree. She then worked at the Morgan Library & Museum, taking a little break from the Romantic period to specialize in twentieth-century works. After cataloging World War II-era poetry at the Morgan, Denlinger realized she had made herself a strong candidate for becoming the curator of the Pforzheimer Collection, finding her way back to the Romantic period.
While many people, often at a young age, are charmed by Byron and his work, Denlinger was not quite so quick to consider herself a fan. A student of Wollstonecraft and her contemporaries, Denlinger found it hard to justify the glorification of the poet alongside his detestation for intellectual women and his overall misogyny (which she points out in the exhibition alongside the dissertation by Akasha Hull, Black feminist and, early in her career, a Byron scholar), particularly showcased in the misogynistic rhymes in Don Juan. Denlinger explained she hated Byron in graduate school, but added she didn’t give him a fair chance until she worked on Shelley and his Circle and became more familiar with Byron’s letters and journals. “If you want to make someone fall in love with Byron, that’s the way to go,” she stated. Now, she explains she has a deep admiration for the poet, but has arrived at a place of “deep ambivalence” towards him after working on the exhibition—which, to me, is a perfect perspective from which to curate an exhibition on his life.
Out of the manuscripts, letters, drawings, and other objects in the exhibition, when I asked if she had any favorites Denlinger pointed me to a watercolor by Lady Caroline Lamb, novelist and lover of Byron whom many know as the one who coined the phrase “mad, bad, and dangerous to know” describing him. The watercolor depicts a supine woman with a skeleton leaning over her, guiding the hand of a putto to stab her through with an arrow, which the label describes as “demonstrat[ing] Lamb’s talent, her saturation in the Gothic strain of Regency culture, and her truly creepy imagination.”
At the end of our conversation, Denlinger discussed the challenges of curating an exhibition in a physical space as opposed to online, where one would have virtually unlimited space and the ability to continually edit or add. This space constraint led to her main regret for this exhibition: the relative absence of Byron’s daughter Ada Lovelace. While attention is given to Allegra Byron, the poet’s daughter with Claire Clairmont (Mary Shelley’s stepsister), Denlinger wishes she could have included correspondence between Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage to highlight Ada’s contributions to mathematics and the early days of computer science. Perhaps Ada will have a NYPL exhibition dedicated to her in years to come.
Visit the New York Public Library Stephen A. Schwarzman Building before January 12, 2025, to catch the last few days of this wonderful exhibition.
