GEORGE GORDON BYRON (1788-1824)

- a best-selling poet who eclipses Scott

- the first 2 cantos of Childe Harold (1812) bring him immediate celebrity as the most
articulate voice of the post revolutionary era
- spirit of the age, discontents and frenetic energy
- outsider, vexed, amused by the anomalies of the his time and culture
- modern, theatrical, extravagant – least effective
- best work in the satiric tradition of Pope, not in the contemplation of nature
- critique of public life, recent history, British politics, feverish English nationalisms;
geographical setting: Russia, the Mediterranean, Portugal, Levant
- different models of telling/feeling – from self-exploration to polemic; from melancholic to
comic; from mock-heroic to passionately amorous, from song to epic
- a libertarian and a libertine in public life; astute commentator of his time; enjoys his fame
and the later Romantic pose if opposing established society
- role-playing both in his convoluted private life and his poetry, with a profound impact on
European culture; model of the sullen, restless, Byronic hero rebel
- international celebrity; his life is turned into a work of art interfused with his poetry and
plays
- his iconic status is reflected in his idiosyncratic verse
- radical when it exhibits patrician individualism
- „the present deplorable state of English poetry‟ reflected in the „absurd and systematic
depreciation of Pope‟
- speaks as an outsider, an exile, in disdain rather than dissent
- Fugitive Pieces 1806 – schoolboy‟s exercises
- Hours of Idleness 1807 is met with scathing attacks by the Edinburgh Review; Byron
responds by the satirical pamphlet English Bards and Scotch Reviewers 1809 – verse satin
old fashioned rhyming couplets, showing him at odds with the present, contemporary tastes
of accepted culture and its innovators; irreverent remarks to „turgid‟ Coleridge and „simple‟
Wordsworth
- leaves England for Portugal, Spain, Levant to explore alternative cultural climates; the tout
inspires Child Harold 1812, completed with two additional cantos in 1816/1818 – a view of
the West Mediterranean scarred by war; he deplores the „sad relic‟ of Greece under the
Ottoman misrule
- splenetic aristocratic exile as observer and participant feeling „sick at heart‟ and pangs „as if
the memory of some deadly feud/or disappointed passion lurk‟d below‟; memories of feuds
and passions refer to the internalising of public history into the private present
- appreciates the Spenserian stanza, but does not act on it
- morose self-consciousness
- experiments with verse allowing variety of expression and mood, both satire and sentiment
– ten
- cultivates the eight-line, eleven-syllable ottava rima of Tasso, Ariosto, Pulci
- Beppo, 1818; Don Juan, 1819-24 – a shift from melancholy and misanthropy: „more
agreeable, and certainly more easy, to have drawn on amicable characters‟
- turns to drama – privileged intelligent, arrogant, accursed heroes in the poetic dramas
Sardanapalus, The Two Foscari (tragedies), Cain (mystery), 1821
- Don Juan, 1819-24 – more passive and vivacious – a feast of colloquy and polyphony, told
by a cynical and droll narrator, relaxed, speculative, digressive, discursive:
„never straining hard to versify,/I rattle on exactly as I‟d talk/With anybody in a ride
or walk‟
- ease of telling – the hero‟s indeterminate peripatetic journeys; disrupted, circuitous
wanderings across the Mediterranean to Russia of Catherine the Great and to an amorously
frivolous London; adventures and misadventures accompanied by the narrator‟s worldly-wise
commentary; he debunks received ideas (the glory of war, heroism, fidelity in love, oriental
exoticism)
- undermines the myth of the picturesque, educative journey, the romantic ideaso f fostering
nature, Rousseau‟s faith in human goodness
- he veers from one extreme to another: suffering/luxury, hunger/excess, longing/satiety,
ignorance/knowingness, appearance /reality
- his pretence of purposelessness and self-deprecation hides his artfulness:
„tis my way/Sometimes with and sometimes without occasion/I write what‟s
uppermost, without delay,/This narrative is not meant for narration/But a mere airy
and fantastic basis/To build up common things with common places‟
- his earnestness is constantly qualified
- Byron‟s letters and journals show an energetic restlessness tempered by an amused
detachment, no theory or philosophy:
„I have written from the fullness of my mind, from passion, from impulse – from
many motives – but not for their “sweet voices” – I know the precise worth of public
applause‟