Although Byron is known as one of the major poets of the Romantic period, his work has been faulted by a number of famous writers. According to the poet W. H. Auden in his book Dyer's Hand and Other Essays, Byron's poems need to be "read very rapidly" because if one slows down the "poetry vanishes—the feeling seems superficial, the rhyme forced, the grammar all over the place." While nineteenth-century British poet Matthew Arnold considers Byron, along with Wordsworth, "first and pre-eminent in actual performance . . . among the English poets of this century," he holds a similar opinion of Byron's technical merit. Writing in a preface to Poetry of Byron, Arnold states: "As a poet, he has no fine and exact sense for word and structure and rhythm; he has not the artist's nature and gifts."

Other critics have disagreed with such negative assessments of Byron's...