The subject of Byron's The Vision of Judgment is partly literary and partly political, but its mainspring was Byron's detestation of Cant and hypocrisy.
On the death of King George III, old, mad, and blind, in 1820, the Poet Laureate Robert Southey produced a laudatory poem. Written in unrhymed hexameter, its attempts at dignity achieved no more than a hackneyed pomposity. But far worse was its hypocrisy and sycophantic tone. Entitled "The Vision of Judgment" it showed George III's triumphal entry into the gates of heaven and the damnation of his enemies. To Byron, the blatant flattery of a King, who was at best mediocre and at worst tyrannical, was extremely distasteful.
Byron was particularly incensed because he saw Southey as a renegade - one who had formerly espoused the liberal cause, but had then changed his colours to support the ruling Tory party. Further Southey had publicly attacked Byron's poetry as belonging to the "Satanic School" whose effect was to undermine religion and to corrupt morals. Southey was responsible too, as Byron believed, for spreading certain scandalous rumours about Byron's life in Switzerland. (Byron indeed had torrid affairs with about sixty to seventy women). Byron here took revenge by assailing both Southey and his "Vision" with unsparing mockery.
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At the gates of Heaven, guarded by St. Peter, we find the archangel Michael and Satan claiming King George's soul for heaven and hell respectively. The climax comes when the devil Asmodeus comes carrying the poet Southey himself, taken in the Lake District of England as he was writing his "Vision". Southey, to his delight, is invited to recite his poem only to find its hexameter so awkward as to defy recitation.
After this joking on his "gouty feet" Byron lets him reel off an account of his works as a turncoat. He had written praising regicide as also all kings. He had written both for and against republics, warfare, the reviewing craft and also revolutionary ideas. He offers to write the life of Satan; and when Satan denies the offer, to write Michael's life. As he starts to recite his "Vision" the assembled angels, devils and ghosts all vanished to escape the awful experience. St. Peter knocks down with his keys Southey, who falls down into a lake, but soon came up to the surface
"For all corrupted things are buoyed like corks" and he may be lurking at his den now to "scrawl some 'Life' or 'Vision'".
Byron's Vision is a comic satire whose keynote is deflation marked by a withering scorn, contempt and hilarity at Southey the man and poet.
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