Concerning langpo and Byron, Jonathan Mayhew pointed me to an essay by Jerome McGann in Charles Bernstein's The Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry and Public Policy. The book is out of print and isn't at the St Mary's College library, and the essay isn't online, so I'm not likely to be able to read it unless someone sends me a copy. (That's not a hint.) I remembered McGann as an important and sensitive Byron scholar, but I had no idea he had any connection to L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry. He does: a version of his "Contemporary Poetry, Alternate Routes," which lavishly praises the project of the language poets, appears here, but it looks like a bad OCR job, nearly incoherent in places because of errors in the text. A readable form of the essay is in his Social Values and Poetic Acts: The Historical Judgment of Literary Work.
McGann makes an attempt to connect langpo's antipathy to narrative to what he calls Byron's "anti-narrative" and to Blake's "non-narrative," but I don't buy it. Byron loved stories and entertainment too much for him to be a model for the language poets. What allows McGann to make this Procrustean argument are the same ideological blinders (his happen to be Marxist) that allow him to praise a literary program in the same essay in which he writes, of one of its practitioners and of the movement, "Darragh produces arrangements of textual forms--they are literally unreadable, as is much other L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry." Byron would have a had a field day with these poets whose theory forces them into incoherence; Blake would have seen langpo's privileging of the bare text for the idolatry it is.
8:35:46 PM 
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