A long line of traditional, often conservative, criticism and cultural commentary deplored Byron as a slipshod poet.This pithy yet aptly poetic book, written by one of the world's foremost Romantic scholars, argues that assessment is badly mistaken.Byron's great subject is what he called 'Cant': the habit of abusing the world through misusing language.Setting up his poetry as a laboratory to investigate failures of writing, reading, and thinking, Byron delivered sharp critical judgment on the costs exacted by a careless approach to his Mother Tongue.Perspicuous readings of Byron alongside some of his Romantic contemporaries – Burns, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley – reveal Byron's startling reconfiguration of poetry as a 'broken mirror' and shattered lamp.The paradoxical result was to argue that his age's contradictions, and his own, offered both ethical opportunities and a promise of poetic – broadly cultural – emancipation.This book represents a major contribution to ideas about Romanticism.