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. However, Byron took some delight in Southey's description of him as an author of "monstrous combinations of horrors and mockery, lewdness and impiety." Byron responded to Southey with his own Vision of Judgment (n.b. the "reformist" spelling), where Southey appears as a scribbler writing encomiums on weak kings. Byron, however, additionally took up the theme of a "Satanic" school and developed the "Byronic hero" (not to be confused with Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Satanic Hero") who would, like Satan in Paradise Lost, be a tragic figure who is admirable even when wrong. Charles Baudelaire's poëte 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.
Famous quotes containing the words satanic and/or school:
“of the satanic thistle that raises its horned symmetry
flowering above sister grass-daisies’ pink tiny
bloomlets angelic as lightbulbs—”
—Allen Ginsberg (b. 1926)
“Today, only a fool would offer herself as the singular role model for the Good Mother. Most of us know not to tempt the fates. The moment I felt sure I had everything under control would invariably be the moment right before the principal called to report that one of my sons had just driven somebody’s motorcycle through the high school gymnasium.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)