My article ‘Byron and the Difficulty of Beginning’ has been accepted for publication in the Review of English Studies.  The beginnings of Byron’s longer poems reveal a number of anxieties about the poetic act of beginning. He dealt with these concerns in several ways: revising opening lines, using translations from other poets to begin his poems, repurposing lines he had written in another context, multiplying prefatory paratexts, or asking other people to make decisions about how his poems should begin. His poetic beginnings reflect a concern about whether his poems would find well-informed and sympathetic readers, and they are often concerned with what his readers can be expected to know. In his later poems, however, Byron overcame some of these anxieties as he developed a different understanding of beginnings. Beppo and Don Juan are sustained by beginning gestures, which recur repeatedly throughout the poems. These beginnings reflect the poems’ openness to contingency, which tends to make all beginnings necessarily provisional, in life as in art.  The essay will appear in a forthcoming issue of the journal.

I’m very happy to have been invited to give the World Book Day Lecture at the University of Otago in New Zealand next March.  World Book Day next year is on 1 March.  I’m not quite sure what I’m going to talk about yet, but I’m planning to say something about the things we do with books and the things they do to us.

I’m off to the British Association of Romantic Studies conference at the Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies, University of York.  This is the leading academic conference in the UK for studies of Romantic literature and the Romantic period.  The topic this year is ‘Romantic Improvement’.  I’ll be talking about the ways in which Victorian preachers and religious writers tried to ‘improve’ the image of Percy Bysshe Shelley in their sermons and writings to make him more palatable to Victorian Christians.