Satanic School
title: "Satanic School" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["english-poetry", "writers-of-the-romantic-era"] topic_path: "general/english-poetry" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_School" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0
The Satanic School was a name applied by Robert Southey to a class of writers headed by Byron and Shelley, because, according to him, their productions were "characterized by a Satanic spirit of pride and audacious impiety".
The term was, therefore, initially coined in Southey's A Vision of Judgement (1821) as one of opprobrium and moral condemnation. Charles Baudelaire's poète maudit would emerge from the Byronic hero.
Thomas Carlyle responded to this new anti-hero and accused Byron and Shelley of wasting their breath in a fierce "wrangle with the devil", having "not the courage to fairly face and honestly fight him". Byron, in the materials surrounding Manfred, would suggest that these characters are not paragons of bourgeois virtues but are, rather, creatures of fire and spirit.
References
Bibliography
- Metzger, Lore. "Satanic School" in Alex Preminger and T.V.F. Brogan, eds., The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. 1114.
References
- (1972–1973). "Southey's "Satanic School" Remarks: An Old Charge for a New Offender". Keats-Shelley Association of America, Inc..
- (August 1953). "Byron and the Byronic".
- (1994). "Thomas Carlyle: Chaotic Man, Inarticulate Hero". [[Saint Joseph's University Press]].
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