English Romanticism Debating Over the New Paradise: Byron vs the Lake Poets

The paper focuses on the images of the golden age, paradise regained and New Jeru- salem correlating in the works by English Romantic poets of the first generation. It also regards the transformation of these images and responses to them in Byron’s poetical works related to the biblical myth. It is proved that the concept of new paradise being so controversial due to it being basically formed by the aesthetic discourse concerning the lost and the new paradise (developed in works of the Lake Poets) and by transforming this discourse through the idea of inaccessibility of both the individual and the general paradise in Byron’s poetry. Keywords: Wordsworth; Coleridge; Byron; the biblical myth; the French Revolution; images of the golden age; myth of paradise.