Submission: Poetry in Honour of Lord Byron
‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’: Poems in Honour of Lord Byron for the Bicentenary Year of his Death (2024) was published on 16 July 2024, the 200th anniversary of Lord Byron’s burial. You can read the collection here.
We at Gothic Keats Press are excited to announce a collection of contemporary poetry in honour of the one and only Lord Byron to commemorate the bicentenary of his death in 1824. The submission window for poems will be from 1 March until 1 June 2024, with the finished collection being published on 16 July 2024, which is the anniversary of Byron’s burial at the Church of St Mary Magdalene in Hucknall, Nottinghamshire.
Byron led a most extraordinary life. He was a celebrity in every sense of the word, famed for his poetry just as much as he was infamous for his personality, the latter, according to his own words, was ‘so changeable, being everything by turns and nothing long — I am such a strange mélange of good and evil, that it would be difficult to describe me.’ And yet described he was, frequently, in life and in death, by many notable characters including Lady Caroline Lamb (whom Byron had a scandalous affair with) who rather infamously described him as ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’, and even Mary Shelley who, knowing him as a friend, understood his more positive contradictions, describing him as a ‘fascinating — faulty — childish — philosophical being’ who, quite characteristically, ‘[dared] the world’, and yet she continues that he was ‘docile in a private circle — impetuous and indolent — gloomy and yet more gay than any other’.
The contradictions in Byron’s own persona — captivating, yet tragically flawed — paired brilliantly well with characters from his poetry, notably the titular characters from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812-1818) and Manfred (1817), and, perhaps especially, in the character of Conrad from The Corsair (1814) which sold ten thousand copies on its first day of publication. Although Bryon denied the association of a ‘real personage’, writing that ‘Harold is the child of imagination’, the reading public was fascinated and believed these tragically romantic characters were based on Byron himself, and thus the literary archetype of the Byronic Hero was born. Byron epitomised these romantic characteristics of the solitary figure tortured by some unknown secret, the ‘sublime misanthrope’, mercurial, cynical, egotistical, the brooding romantic of ‘loneliness and mystery, / Scarce seen to smile, and seldom heard to sigh’, and yet intensely passionate, talented in every way, and capable of deep feeling.
There is much to write about Lord Byron, and we only wanted to include these brief paragraphs to illustrate aspects of his character and, well, ‘Byronic qualities’, that continue to captivate us all. And just like the multiple facets of his persona, both fact and poetic fiction alike, there are many ways to honour Byron with a poem. With that in mind, please be as creative as you like. It is not a requirement to have ‘Byron’ in the title or within the poem itself, but it is certainly fine provided that it works well. Other examples can include:
take lines from one of Byron’s poems or letters that inspires you, use them as an epigraph, and write a poem based on these lines (this could be personal to you, or related to Byron’s life)
take one of Byron’s poems that has meaning to you and write a poem based on it (not a pastiche, and please do include that your poem was written after whichever poem of Byron’s you choose)
take a particular period in Byron’s life that interests you and write a poem about it (this can be the ‘haunted summer’ of 1816 at Villa Diodati where Byron famously challenged all to write a ghost story which would help inspire two masterworks of Gothic literature: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Dr John William Polidori’s The Vampyre; Byron’s time of scandal and debauchery in Venice, or Italy in general where Byron had lived an extraordinary life between 1816-1823 and wrote some of his greatest poetry; or Byron’s time in Greece until his death in support of the Greek War of Independence)
a poem based on the friendship of Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley (see Shelley’s poem Julian and Maddalo as an example, which, in another important bicentenary, was first published in Posthumous Poems in 1824, edited by Mary Shelley)
a poem based on the irrevocable destruction of Byron’s memoirs shortly after his death, which has been called ‘the greatest crime in literary history’
and, as a last example, you can write a poem inspired by anyone from Byron’s circle, including the Shelleys, Claire Clairmont, Dr Polidori, Countess Guiccioli, or even members of his family, including his father Captain John ‘Mad Jack’ Byron, his half-sister Augusta Leigh, and his daughter Ada Lovelace
The ways to honour Byron with a poem are positively endless, but, more than anything, we are looking for good poetry. We think Byron would appreciate that.
Submission Details:
All poetry sent to us must be original and unpublished. Your poem(s) should not have appeared anywhere else, in print or online, including personal websites, blogs, and social media posts.
Line count: We will accept poems with a maximum of 100 lines; however, due to the possible length of the collection, we much prefer poems between 35-50 lines.
Language: The majority of our collection will be in English; however, given that Byron was truly a European writer (an international writer, to be sure), we are accepting a limited number of new poems in translation. That is to say that accepted translated poems will have the poem in the original language with the English translation on the opposite page.
Non-native speakers of English (who also possess a strong command of the English language and are able to translate their poems into English), please send us your poems in your native language accompanied by your English translation.
Native speakers of English who speak and write in multiple languages (don’t worry, we know there are many of you, including us), please send us your poems in English only.
How to Submit: Please send no more than 3 poems all within a Word file attachment (.doc, .docx, or .rtf) to gothickeatspress@gmail.com. Include a brief cover letter within the Word file (you may tell us a little about the inspiration behind your poem(s) if you wish, but this is not required), as well as a short biography written in the third person (no more than 100 words).
We will accept simultaneous submissions, but please let us know immediately if your poem is accepted elsewhere.
A small team of readers and admirers of Byron will be assisting with this collection, so addressing us as ‘Dear Readers’, or even ‘Dear GKP’, within your email and cover letter is perfectly appropriate.
Deadline: The deadline to submit poems is 1 June 2024.
Publication rights: All poems must be original and unpublished (this includes anywhere online, including personal websites and blogs). Gothic Keats Press will have first publication rights, and exclusive rights for one year, but all rights revert to author after that. This simply means that, for the first year of the collection’s publication, your complete poem can only appear in our collection, but after that you are free to do as you wish with it, including publishing it on your own website, within your complete collection of poetry, or with another publication who accepts previously published work — wherever your poem appears next, just please include that it was first published with us in 2024.
Payment: All contributors will receive a copy of the collection, both in paperback and electronic format.