English Bards and Scotch Reviewers

English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, satire in verse by Lord Byron, first published anonymously in 1809. The poem was written in response to the adverse criticism that The Edinburgh Review had given Hours of Idleness (1807), Byron’s first published volume of poetry. In English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, Byron used heroic couplets in imitation of Alexander Pope’s The Dunciad to attack the reigning poets of Romanticism, including William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Francis...