173- ] English Literature
Lord Byron
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Literary
Career , Life & Romanticism
The
most flamboyant and notorious of the major English Romantic poets, George
Gordon, Lord Byron, was likewise the most fashionable poet of the early 1800s.
He created an immensely popular Romantic hero—defiant, melancholy, haunted by
secret guilt—for which, to many, he seemed the model. He is also a Romantic
paradox: a leader of the era’s poetic revolution, he named Alexander Pope as
his master; a worshiper of the ideal, he never lost touch with reality; a deist
and freethinker, he retained from his youth a Calvinist sense of original sin;
a peer of the realm, he championed liberty in his works and deeds, giving
money, time, energy, and finally his life to the Greek war of independence. His
faceted personality found expression in satire, verse narrative, ode, lyric,
speculative drama, historical tragedy, confessional poetry, dramatic monologue,
seriocomic epic, and voluminous correspondence, written in Spenserian stanzas,
heroic couplets, blank verse, terza rima, ottava rima, and vigorous prose. In
his dynamism, sexuality, self-revelation, and demands for freedom for oppressed
people everywhere, Byron captivated the Western mind and heart as few writers
have, stamping upon 19th-century letters, arts, politics, even clothing styles,
his image and name as the embodiment of Romanticism.
George
Gordon Noel Byron was born, with a clubbed right foot, in London on January 22,
1788. He was the son of Catherine Gordon of Gight, an impoverished Scots
heiress, and Captain John (“Mad Jack”) Byron, a fortune-hunting widower with a
daughter, Augusta. The profligate captain squandered his wife’s inheritance,
was absent for the birth of his only son, and eventually decamped for France as
an exile from English creditors, where he died in 1791 at 36.
Emotionally
unstable, Catherine Byron raised her son in an atmosphere variously colored by
her excessive tenderness, fierce temper, insensitivity, and pride. She was as
likely to mock his lameness as to consult doctors about its correction. From
his Presbyterian nurse Byron developed a lifelong love for the Bible and an
abiding fascination with the Calvinist doctrines of innate evil and predestined
salvation. Early schooling instilled a devotion to reading and especially a
“grand passion” for history that informed much of his later writing.
With
the death in 1798 of his great-uncle, the “Wicked” fifth Lord Byron, George
became the sixth Baron Byron of Rochdale, heir to Newstead Abbey, the family
seat in Nottinghamshire. He enjoyed the role of landed nobleman, proud of his
coat of arms with its mermaid and chestnut horses surmounting the motto “Crede Byron”
(“Trust Byron”).
An
“ebullition of passion” for his cousin Margaret Parker in 1800 inspired his
“first dash into poetry.” From 1801 to
1805, he attended the Harrow School, where he excelled in oratory, wrote verse,
and played sports. He also formed the first of those passionate attachments
with other, chiefly younger, boys that he would enjoy throughout his life;
before reaching his teen years he had been sexually initiated by his maid.
There can be little doubt that he had strong bisexual tendencies, though
relationships with women seem generally, but not always, to have satisfied his
emotional needs more fully.
In
the summer of 1803 he fell so deeply in love with his distant cousin, the
beautiful-and engaged-Mary Chaworth of Annesley Hall, that he interrupted his
education for a term to be near her. Years later he told Thomas Medwin that all
his “fables about the celestial nature of women” originated from “the
perfection” his imagination created in Mary Chaworth.
Early
in 1804 he began an intimate correspondence with his half sister, Augusta, five
years his senior. He asked that she consider him “not only as a Brother” but as
her “warmest and most affectionate Friend.” As he grew apart from his
capricious, often violent, mother, he drew closer to Augusta.
Byron
attended Trinity College, Cambridge, intermittently from October 1805 until
July 1808, when he received a MA degree. During “the most romantic period of
[his] life,” he experienced a “violent, though pure, love and passion” for John
Edleston, a choirboy at Trinity two years younger than he. Intellectual
pursuits interested him less than such London diversions as fencing and boxing
lessons, the theater, demimondes, and gambling. Living extravagantly, he began
to amass the debts that would bedevil him for years. In Southwell, where his
mother had moved in 1803, he prepared his verses for publication.
In
November 1806 he distributed around Southwell his first book of poetry.
Fugitive Pieces , printed at his expense and anonymously, collects the poems
inspired by his early infatuations, friendships, and experiences at Harrow,
Cambridge, and elsewhere. When his literary adviser, the Reverend John Thomas
Becher, a local minister, objected to the frank eroticism of certain lines,
Byron suppressed the volume. A revised and expurgated selection of verses
appeared in January 1807 as Poems on Various Occasions, in an edition of 100
copies, also printed privately and anonymously. An augmented collection, Hours
of Idleness, “By George Gordon, Lord Byron, A Minor,” was published in June.
The new poems in this first public volume of his poetry are little more than
schoolboy translations from the classics and imitations of such pre-Romantics
as Thomas Gray, Thomas Chatterton, and Robert Burns, and of contemporaries
including Walter Scott and Thomas Moore. Missing were the original flashes of
eroticism and satire that had enlivened poems in the private editions. The work
has value for what it reveals about the youthful poet’s influences, interests,
talent, and direction. In “On a Change of Masters at a Great Public School,” he
employs heroic couplets for satiric effect in the manner of Alexander Pope, a
model for Byron throughout his career. In obviously autobiographical poems
Byron experiments with personae, compounded of his true self and of fictive
elements, which both disclose and disguise him. Groups of verses on a single
subject show his understanding of the effectiveness of multiple points of view.
It
was as a published poet that Byron returned to Cambridge in June 1807. Besides
renewing acquaintances, he formed an enduring friendship with John Cam
Hobhouse—his beloved “Hobby.” Inclined to liberalism in politics, Byron joined
Hobhouse in the Cambridge Whig Club. In February 1808 the influential Whig
journal the Edinburgh Review, published anonymously Henry Brougham’s notice of
Hours of Idleness, which combined justifiable criticism of the book with
unwarranted personal assaults on the author. The scornfully worded review had a
beneficial effect. Stung and infuriated, Byron set aside mawkish, derivative,
occasional verse and began avenging himself through satire, expanding his
poetic commentary on present-day “British Bards,” started the previous year, to
include a counterblast against “Scotch Reviewers."
In
March 1809, two months after attaining his majority, he took his seat in the
House of Lords. Shortly thereafter, Byron’s first major poetic work, English
Bards, and Scotch Reviewers . A Satire , was published anonymously in an
edition of 1,000 copies. Inspired by the Dunciad of his idol, Pope, the poem,
in heroic couplets, takes indiscriminate aim at most of the poets and
playwrights of the moment, notably Walter Scott, Robert Southey, William
Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. His main target is the critics. From
these “harpies that must be fed” he singles out for condemnation “immortal”
Francis Jeffrey, whom he mistakenly assumed had written the offending comments
on Hours of Idleness in the Edinburgh Review.
The
satire created a stir and found general favor with the reviewers. The overall
aim, as stated in the preface, is “to make others write better.” Of the major
Romantic poets, Byron most sympathized with neoclassicism, with its order,
discipline, and clarity. The importance of English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers
lies not only in its vigor and vitality but in Byron’s lively advocacy of the
neoclassical virtues found in such 17th- and 18th-century poets as Dryden and
Pope, and, from his own day, in Gifford. His admiration for Pope never wavered,
nor did he ever totally abandon the heroic couplet and Augustan role of censor
and moralist, as seen in Hints from Horace (written 1811), The Curse of Minerva
(written 1811), and The Age of Bronze (written 1822-1823). Feeling revenged on
the reviewers, Byron was anxious to realize a long-held dream of traveling
abroad. Though in debt, he gathered together sufficient resources to allow him
to begin a tour of the eastern Mediterranean. Anxious to set down the myriad
experiences the trip afforded him, Byron began an autobiographical poem in
Ioannina, Greece, on October 31, 1809, wherein he recorded the adventures and
reflections of Childe Burun (a combination of the archaic title for a youth of
noble birth and an ancient form of his own surname); he subsequently renamed the
hero Harold. The Spenserian stanza in which he cast his impressions no doubt
derived from his readings in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene reprinted in an
anthology he had carried on his trip. Byron completed the first canto in Athens
at the end of the year.
Turning
southward, he and Hobhouse journeyed through Missolonghi and rode into Athens
on Christmas night 1809. They lodged at the foot of the Acropolis with Mrs.
Tarsia Macri, widow of a Greek who had been British vice consul. Byron soon
fell in love with her three daughters, all under the age of 15, but especially
with Theresa, only 12, his “Maid of Athens."
Excursions
in January 1810 to Cape Sounion, overlooking the islands of the Cyclades, and
to Marathon, where the Athenians defeated the invading Persians in 490 B.C.,
reinforced for him the appalling contrast between the glory and might of
ancient Greece and its contemporary disgrace. He movingly evoked these scenes
and sentiments a decade later in the often-quoted stanzas on “The Isles of
Greece” and on Marathon in Don Juan.
In
March 1810 Byron and Hobhouse extended their tour into Turkey. On March 28, in
Smyrna, he completed the second canto of Childe Harold, incorporating his
adventures in Albania and his thoughts on Greece. He visited the plain of Troy
and on May 3, while Hobhouse read Ovid’s Hero and Leander, imitated Leander’s
feat of swimming the Hellespont; within a week, lines “Written After Swimming
from Sestos to Abydos” commemorated his pride in this exploit. In July he
traveled back to Athens, where he settled in the Capuchin monastery below the
Acropolis. Here, he studied Italian and modern Greek, just as he would learn
Armenian from monks in Venice six years later.
Stirred
to literary composition, he first produced explanatory notes for Childe Harold;
then, in February and March 1811, he wrote two poems in heroic couplets. Hints
from Horace, a sequel to English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers, satirizes
contemporary poetry and drama, while praising Dryden, Pope, Swift, and Butler.
Byron
arrived at Sheerness, Kent, on July 14, two years and 12 days after his
departure. To Augusta he wrote on September 9 that he had probably acquired
nothing by his travels but “a smattering of two languages & a habit of
chewing Tobacco,” but this claim was disingenuous. “If I am a poet,” he mused,
“... the air of Greece has made me one.” He had accumulated source material for
any number of works. More, exposure to all manner of persons, behavior,
government, and thought had transformed him into a citizen of the world, with
broadened political opinions and a clear-sighted view of prejudice and
hypocrisy in the “tight little island” of England. Significantly, he would
select as the epigraph for Childe Harold a passage from Le Cosmopolite, ou, le
Citoyen du Monde (1753), by Louis Charles Fougeret de Monbron, that, in part,
compares the universe to a book of which one has read but the first page if he
has seen only his own country.
Within
three weeks of his return, Byron was plunged into a period of prolonged
mourning. His mother died on August 2, before he set out for Newstead. Whatever
her failings, she had loved her son, taken pride in his accomplishments, and
managed Newstead economically in his absence. “I had but one friend in the
world,” he exclaimed, “and she is gone.” News of the deaths of two classmates
followed hard upon this sorrow. Then, in October, he learned of the death from
consumption of John Edleston, the former choirboy at Trinity College. Deeply
affected, he lamented his loss in the lines “To Thyrza” (1811), a woman’s name
concealing the subject’s true identity and gender. He also commemorated
Edleston in additions to Childe Harold.
In
January 1812 Byron resumed his seat in the House of Lords, allying himself with
the Liberal Whigs. During his political career he spoke but three times in the
House of Lords, taking unpopular sides. In his maiden speech on February 27 he
defended stocking weavers in his home area of Nottinghamshire who had broken
the improved weaving machinery, or frames, that deprived them of work and
reduced them to near starvation; he opposed as cruel and unjust a
government-sponsored bill that made frame breaking a capital offense. On April
21, he made a plea for Catholic emancipation, the most controversial issue of
the day.
Upon
his return to England in July 1811, Byron had given the manuscript of Childe
Harold to R.C. Dallas, his adviser in the publication of English Bards, and
Scotch Reviewers. Dallas enthusiastically showed the poem to John Murray II,
the respected publisher of Scott and Southey, who agreed to publish Byron,
beginning a rich association between publisher and poet.
On
March 10, 1812 Murray published Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Cantos I and II.
500 quarto copies, priced at 30 shillings each, sold out in three days. An
octavo edition of 3,000 copies at 12 shillings was on the market within two
days. Shortly after Childe Harold appeared, Byron remarked, “I awoke one
morning and found myself famous.” Murray brought out five editions of the poem
in 1812 alone, and published the 10th, and last, separate edition in 1815. In
less than six months sales had reached 4,500 copies. In the Edinburgh Review,
Jeffrey cited as the “chief excellence” of Childe Harold “a singular freedom
and boldness, both of thought and expression, and a great occasional force and
felicity of diction.”
Childe
Harold’s Pilgrimage, Cantos I and II, can be read as Byron’s poetic journal of
his Mediterranean and Eastern tour in 1809 to 1811. But the international
popularity of the work derived less from its appeal as a travelogue than from
its powerful articulation of the Weltschmerz, or “World-weariness,” born of the
chaos of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars that disrupted all of
European society.
In
Canto I Harold, “sore sick at heart” with his life of “revel and ungodly glee,”
leaves his native Albion on pilgrimage to find peace and spiritual rebirth. As
befits a quest poem, Childe Harold is subtitled A Romaunt, recalling the
medieval romances whose knighted heroes go in search of holy objects, and is
cast in the stanza and archaic language of Spenser’s Faerie Queene.
Harold
was introduced, Byron wrote in the preface, “for the sake of giving some
connexion to the piece.” By labeling Harold “a fictitious character” Byron
sought to dissociate himself from his protagonist, but his readers, noting many
and striking similarities, persisted in equating the artist with his hero.
Though he, too, speculated on such a relationship, Walter Scott, recognized
that in Harold Byron had created a new and significant Romantic character type
which reappeared in almost all his heroes.
Harold
is the first “Byronic Hero.” Of complicated ancestry (admirably traced by Peter
L. Thorslev, Jr.), he descends, with inherited traits, from Prometheus,
Milton’s Satan, the sentimental heroes found in Jean-Jacques Rousseau and
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, hero-villains in Gothic novels by Horace Walpole
and Ann Radcliffe, Friedrich von Schiller’s Karl Moor, and Sir Walter Scott’s
Marmion. Thorslev insists that, as befits their complex genealogy, Byron’s
various heroes exhibit not uniformity, but considerable diversity. Among their
traits are romantic melancholy, guilt for secret sin, pride, defiance,
restlessness, alienation, revenge, remorse, moodiness, and such noble virtues
as honor, altruism, courage, and pure love for a gentle woman.
The
drawing rooms and salons of Whig society vied for Byron’s presence and lionized
him. At Holland House, he met the spirited, impulsive Lady Caroline Lamb, who
initially judged him “mad—bad—and dangerous to know.” Their tempestuous affair
lasted through the summer, until Byron rejected her; she continued the pursuit,
burned “effigies” of his picture, and transformed their relationship into a
Gothic romance in her novel Glenarvon (1816).
Despite
its outcome, his connection with Lady Caroline left him on friendly terms with
her mother-in-law, the witty Elizabeth Milbanke Lamb, Lady Melbourne. Through
her, in September, he proposed marriage to her niece, Anne Isabella (Annabella)
Milbanke, as a possible means of escaping the insistent Caroline. A 20-year-old
bluestocking, Annabella was widely read in literature and philosophy and showed
a talent for mathematics. She declined the proposal in the belief that Byron
would never be “the object of that strong affection” which would make her
“happy in domestic life.” With good humor and perhaps relief Byron accepted the
refusal; in a letter of October 18, 1812 he thanked Lady Melbourne for her
efforts with his “Princess of Parallelograms.” By November he was conducting an
affair with the mature Jane Elizabeth Scott, Lady Oxford, a patroness of the
Reform Movement.
Between
June 1813 and February 1816, Byron completed and had published six extremely
popular verse tales, five of them influenced by his travels in Greece and
Turkey: The Giaour (June 1813), The Bride of Abydos (December 1813), The
Corsair (February 1814), Lara (August 1814), and The Siege of Corinth and
Parisina (February 1816). Walter Scott had created the market for Romantic
narratives in verse, but Byron outrivaled him with his erotic fare set in
“exotic” climes, to the extent that Scott gave up the genre in favor of novel
writing.
In
June 1813 Byron began an affair with his 29-year-old half sister, Augusta.
Married since 1807 to her cousin, Colonel George Leigh, with his mother’s death
in 1811, Augusta became Byron’s sole remaining close relative. While no legal
proof exists, the circumstantial evidence in Byron’s letters dating from August
1813 to his horrified confidante Lady Melbourne strongly suggests an incestuous
connection with Augusta.
In
the midst of this relationship, Byron received a letter from Annabella
Milbanke, who confessed her mistake in rejecting his proposal and cautiously
sought to renew their friendship. Correspondence ensued. He later wrote Lady
Melbourne that Augusta wished him “much to marry—because it was the only chance
of redemption for two persons."
Through
poetry he found relief from his involvement with Augusta and from an
inconclusive flirtation in the autumn of 1813 with Lady Frances Wedderburn
Webster. In November he wrote Thomas Moore, “All convulsions end with me in
rhyme; and to solace my midnights, I have scribbled another Turkish Tale.” The
Bride of Abydos, published by Murray in December, sold 6,000 copies in one month.
For the first time in this volume Byron dealt with the theme of incest, his
“perverse passion,” as he told Lady Melbourne, to which he would return in such
poems as Parisina, Manfred, and Cain.
Another
burst of poetic creativity overlapped the success of The Bride of Abydos.
Between December 18 and 31, Byron produced a third Oriental tale, The Corsair.
On the day of publication in February 1814 10,000 copies were sold, “a thing,”
Murray excitedly assured him, “perfectly unprecedented.”
On
April 10, 1814, amid rumors of the abdication and exile of the emperor Napoleon
(which in fact occurred the next day), Byron wrote and copied Ode to Napoleon
Buonaparte. On the 16th, it was published anonymously. Since Harrow, Byron had
had mixed feelings about Napoleon. He admired the titanic qualities of the
brilliant strategist, dynamic soldier, and statesman, but he was repelled by
his brutal conquest of Iberia and his perversion of liberal ideals. That
ambivalence colors the poem.
On
April 15, 1814 Augusta gave birth to a little girl, Elizabeth Medora. When
Medora Leigh grew up, she believed herself to be Byron’s daughter, although
Byron never acknowledged the paternity, as he did for his other illegitimate
offspring, either because of uncertainty or concern for his and Augusta’s
reputations. There is no extant proof either way. On May 14, Byron began a
sequel to The Corsair entitled Lara, the new name of Conrad the pirate. Murray
published the work anonymously in August in a volume with Samuel Rogers’s
sentimental tale Jacqueline; the book sold 6,000 copies in three editions.
Byron
spent much of the summer of 1814 with Augusta, while continuing to correspond
with Annabella. In a letter dated September 9, he made a tentative proposal of
marriage; she promptly accepted it. In marriage Byron hoped to find a rational
pattern of living and to reconcile the conflicts that plagued him. After
inauspicious hesitations and postponements, many of his own making, Byron
married Annabella on January 2, 1815 in the parlor of her parents’ home in
Seaham; there was no reception. Toward his bride the groom was by turns tender
and abusive.
At
Halnaby Hall Byron resumed work on the Hebrew Melodies, lyrics for airs Jewish
composer Isaac Nathan was adapting from the music of the synagogue. Throughout
his life Byron was a fervent reader of the Bible and a lover of traditional
songs and legends. As a champion of freedom, he may also have responded
instinctively to the oppression long suffered by the Jewish people. The work
opens with the now-famous lyric, “She Walks in Beauty,” written in 1814 after
Byron saw a cousin at a party wearing a dress of mourning with spangles on it.
In
April, after a tempestuous visit with Augusta, Lord and Lady Byron settled in
the Duchess of Devonshire’s London house, at 13 Piccadilly Terrace. Throughout
1815 financial problems and heavy drinking drove Byron into rages and fits of
irrational behavior. When Annabella was in an advanced stage of pregnancy, he
made her the scapegoat for his troubles. On December 10, 1815, she gave birth
to Augusta Ada Byron (the first name was later dropped). Early in the new year,
increased money worries forced Byron to suggest that they move from their
expensive Piccadilly Terrace address. Lady Byron and Augusta Ada would precede
him to her family’s estate in Leicestershire, Kirkby Mallory, while he
attempted to placate the creditors. Early in the morning of January 15, 1816,
Lady Byron and Augusta Ada left London by carriage for Kirkby Mallory before
Byron had risen. He never saw them again.
From
Kirkby Mallory Lady Byron wrote affectionately to her husband in London, urging
him to join her. Her subsequent revelations to her parents about Byron’s
threatening speech and cruel behavior turned them against him. On February 2, her father wrote Byron to propose a quiet
separation. Byron was shocked. Unavailing was his protest, in a letter to his
wife on the 15th, that he loved his “dearest Bell ... to the dregs of [his]
memory & existence.” A week later, Lady Byron probably confessed to her
lawyer her suspicion of incest between Byron and Augusta, adding it to the
prior charges of adultery and cruelty; by the end of the month, the rumors
about brother and sister were widespread. On March 17 the terms for the legal
separation were agreed upon.
During
the separation crisis, Byron had a casual liaison with Claire (Jane) Clairmont.
That she was the stepdaughter of the philosopher William Godwin and the
stepsister of Mary Godwin, with whom Percy Bysshe Shelley had eloped in 1814,
may have induced him to tolerate her determined advances, which he had no
intention of encouraging.
Byron
signed the final deed of separation on April 21, having decided to go abroad
with the completion of this formality. On the 25th, they sailed from Dover
bound for Ostend. Byron would never see England again.
The
party reached Geneva on May 25, 1816. Byron was unaware that waiting for him
were Claire Clairmont, pregnant with his child, Shelley, and Mary Godwin. They
passed the time agreeably by boating on Lake Leman and conversing at the Villa
Diodati, which Byron had rented, with its commanding view of the lake and the
Juras beyond. In this environment Mary wrote Frankenstein; or, The Modern
Prometheus, published in 1818.
In
June Byron and Shelley sailed to the Château de Chillon. The story of François
Bonivard, a 16th-century Swiss patriot and political prisoner in the château’s
dungeon, inspired Byron to compose one of his most popular poems, The Prisoner
of Chillon. The simplicity and directness of Bonivard’s dramatic monologue
throw into relief the powerful theme of political tyranny. In Bonivard, Byron
created a protagonist free from the traits of the typical “Byronic hero,” one
who possessed greater credibility and maturity than his predecessors. The poem,
in turn, expresses deeper human understanding and advances more positive values
than earlier works.
On
July 4, three days after returning from his boat tour of Lake Leman, Byron
completed the third canto of Childe Harold. Its framework is a poetic
travelogue based on his journey from Dover to Waterloo, then along the Rhine
and into Switzerland. Having failed to maintain a convincing distinction
between himself and his hero in the previous cantos, Byron drops the pretense
and speaks in his own right. Harold becomes a shadowy presence who disappears
in the middle of the canto, absorbed into the narrator. The new protagonist, a
Hero of Sensibility, expresses the melancholy, passion, and alienation of the
original Harold, as well as Byronic liberalism, sensitivity, and meditation.
Four
major themes inform the third canto. The invocation in the opening stanza—made
not to the Muse or another classical figure but to Ada, “sole daughter of my
house and heart"—sounds the theme of personal sorrow. The poet-hero is
alone, in voluntary exile, “grown aged in this world of woe.” “Still round him
clung invisibly a chain / Which gall’d for ever, fettering though unseen, / And
heavy though it clank’d not ....” He remains “Proud though in desolation."
The
sight of the field of Waterloo, “this place of skulls, / The grave of France,”
prompts the second theme, an analysis of the strengths and flaws of genius in
Napoleon and Rousseau. Byron recognized himself in the characters of both men.
Like Napoleon he was “antithetically mixt,” “Extreme in all things,” and
possessed of “a fire / And motion of the soul” that “Preys upon high
adventure.” Like “the self-torturing sophist, wild Rousseau, / The apostle of
affliction,” he “threw / Enchantment over passion, and from woe / Wrung
overwhelming eloquence."
Rousseau,
whose writings helped to kindle the French Revolution, and Napoleon, whose
campaigns doomed the hopes born of that struggle, relate directly to the
canto’s theme of war. Byron despised wars of aggression waged for personal gain
while championing as honorable those conflicts that defended freedom, such as
the battles of Marathon and Morat and the French Revolution. Bravura rhetoric
animates the stanzas on Waterloo, from the memorable recreation of the Duchess
of Richmond’s ball in Brussels on the night before the battle, to Byron’s grim
evocation of war—a contemplation of the futility of bravery and of the blood
shed in purposeless slaughter.
The
pilgrim-poet temporarily experiences the thrill of a transcendental concept of
nature, the fourth theme of the canto:
I
live not in myself, but I become
Portion
of that around me; and to me,
High
mountains are a feeling....
And
thus I am absorb’d, and this is life [.]
But
Byron’s affinity with reality prevented him from “Spurning the clay-cold bonds which
round our being cling.” Nature would provide him with no permanent escape from
himself, no remedy for his suffering.
Near
the end he returns to his first theme, of personal sorrow defiantly borne by a
Promethean rebel:
I
have not loved the world, nor the world me;
I
have not flattered its rank breath, nor bow’d
To
its idolatries a patient knee [.]
He
closes the canto as he began it, with an apostrophe to his daughter, “The child
of love."
The
arrival of Hobhouse at the end of August coincided with the departure of
Shelley, Mary, and Claire, who returned to England with the manuscripts of the
third canto of Childe Harold, The Prisoner of Chillon, and the shorter poems;
on January 12, 1817, Claire gave birth to a daughter Byron named Clara Allegra.
When a tour of the Bernese Alps with Hobhouse failed to “lighten the weight” on
his heart or enable him to lose his “own wretched identity,” Byron turned, as
usual, to poetry to purge his broodings and guilt over the separation, Augusta,
and his exile. The catharsis assumed a form new to him—blank-verse drama. He
would write, “not a drama properly—but a dialogue,” set in the high Alps he had
recently visited. He rewrote the third act during a trip to Rome the following
May. Manfred, the eponymous protagonist, is essentially Byron, the drama’s
conflict a fusion of the personal and the cosmic, its goal relief.
Count
Manfred, tortured by “the strong curse” on his soul for some unutterable,
inexpiable, “half-maddening sin” (II.i), seeks “Forgetfulness—/ ... / Of that
which is within me” (I.i). In the first scene, proud and defiant, he revels in
the supremacy of his will over the spirits he raises who are powerless over the
inner self:
The
mind, the spirit, the Promethean spark,
The
lightning of my being, is as bright,
Pervading,
and far-darting as your own,
And
shall not yield to yours, though coop’d in clay!
As
an abbot witnesses his stoic demise, Manfred explains: “Old man! ‘tis not so
difficult to die.” The unconquerable individual to the end, Manfred gives his
soul to neither heaven nor hell, only to death.
Murray
published Childe Harold, Canto III, on November 18, and The Prisoner of
Chillon, and Other Poems on December 5. Within a week of publication, 7,000
copies of each volume had been sold. Reviewing these works in the December 1816
number of the Edinburgh Review, Jeffrey proclaimed that “in force of diction,
and inextinguishable energy of sentiment,” Byron took “precedence of all his
distinguished contemporaries.”
Byron
set out in mid-April 1817 to join Hobhouse in Rome. In Ferrara, his visit to
the cell where the 16th-century poet Torquato Tasso had been confined for
madness inspired an impassioned dramatic monologue, The Lament of Tasso.
Byron
settled in mid-June at the Villa Foscarini at La Mira on the Brenta, seven
miles from Venice. Here, he began to distill his memories of Rome into poetry.
Composing rapidly, he had completed the first draft for 126 stanzas of Childe
Harold, Canto IV, by mid-July, but he revised and expanded the manuscript for
the rest of the year.
Continuing
the pilgrimage format of the earlier cantos, the framework for this longest of
the sections is a spirited Italian journey from Venice through Arqua (where
Byron had seen the house and tomb of Petrarch) and Ferrara (city of Tasso and
Ludovico Ariosto) to Florence and on to Rome, the setting for half of the
canto.
The
pilgrim-narrator of Canto IV focuses sharply on the contrast between the
transience of mighty empires, exemplified by Venice and Rome, and the
transcendence of great art over human limitations, change, and death. An
elegiac tone evoked by “Fall’n states and buried greatness” suffuses the
verses. “A ruin amidst ruins,” the pilgrim-narrator digresses easily from
scenes of shattered columns and broken arches to considerations of his own
sufferings and of war and liberty. The days of Venice’s glory are no more, “but
Beauty still is here. / ... Nature doth not die.” Literature, too, is permanent
and beneficial. The sic transit gloria mundi theme in Childe Harold finds its
finest Byronic expression in this canto, which traces through their history and
ruins the “dying Glory” of Venice and, especially, the fall of Rome.
In
his famous apostrophe to the ocean, beginning “Roll on, thou deep and dark blue
ocean—roll!,” Byron contrasts its permanence, power, and freedom with vanished
civilizations: “Thy shores are empires, changed in all save thee—/ Assyria,
Greece, Rome, Carthage, what are they?” The ocean remains,
“Dark-heaving;—boundless, endless, and sublime—/ The image of Eternity...."
Melancholy
colors the farewell; Byron knew that the Childe Harold theme had “died into an
echo.” But life in Venice had lifted his spirits. Before he finished this
canto, he had begun the spritely Beppo, with which he returned to satire and
prepared the way for Don Juan.
Late
summer 1817 marks a significant development in Byron’s literary career. On
August 29, he heard about the return of a supposedly deceased husband to his
Venetian wife; she had meanwhile taken an amoroso, and then had to choose her
husband, her lover, or solitary life on a pension. At this time,
serendipitously, he happened to see John Hookham Frere’s Whistlecraft (1817), a
mock-heroic satire in ottava rima modeled on the Italian burlesque. The
demanding rhyme scheme of ottava rima—a b a b a c c—encourages comic rhymes.
Its couplet allows the stanza to end with a witty punch line, with a reversal
in tone from high to low, or with a clever rhyme to surprise the reader. The
seriocomic mood, colloquial style, and digressions of ottava rima, attracted
Byron to this verse form as the medium for his witty version of the story of
Venetian customs and light morals. By October 10, he had finished Beppo. His
new poem, he assured Murray on March 25, 1818, would show the public that he
could “write cheerfully, & repel the charge of monotony & mannerism.”
The
story Byron tells is slight. Beppo, a Venetian merchant, returns home during
Carnival after years of Turkish captivity, to discover that his wife, Laura,
has taken a count for her lover. After the three pleasantly discuss the amatory
triangle, the husband and wife reunite, and Beppo befriends the count. In its
gaiety, verve, and absence of rhetoric, Beppo signaled a break with Byron’s
earlier, darker works. Banished is the soul-ravaged hero with his pride and
pessimism, replaced by the poet-narrator—conversational, digressive, witty,
observant, cynical. Byron’s first attempt at the Italian “medley poem” allowed
him to experiment with the style most congenial to his spirit and best suited
to his talents. In this fresh, realistic voice he would create his comic
masterpiece Don Juan.
Murray
published Beppo, A Venetian Story, without Byron’s name on the title page, on
February 28, 1818, to immediate success.
On April 28, 1818 Murray brought out Childe Harold, Canto IV; the five
printings of the first edition comprise 10,000 copies. In the Quarterly Review
Scott judged that the last part of “this great poem ... sustained Lord Byron’s
high reputation,” possessing less passion and more “deep thought and sentiment”
than the earlier cantos.
Early
in June Byron moved into the Palazzo Mocenigo, with his daughter Allegra
(brought to Venice by the Shelley party in April), whom he had agreed to
support and educate. Here, too, he lodged his 14 servants, a menagerie, and a
veritable harem.
In
a letter to Murray dated July 10, 1818, he mentioned that he had completed an
ode on Venice, and that he had “two stories—one serious & one ludicrous (a
la Beppo) not yet finished—& in no hurry to be so.” The “serious” poem was
Mazeppa, a Cossack verse tale of illicit love and a wild horseback ride. The
“ludicrous” work was the lengthy first canto of his comic epic Don Juan,
pronounced, for the sake of the humor, to rhyme with “new one” and “true one.”
Over the next five years Byron added 15 more cantos to the poem, leaving a 17th
unfinished at his death. Hobhouse and other friends in England praised the
poetry and satire in Don Juan, Canto I, but voiced alarm at its indecencies and
attacks on religion, writers, and Lady Byron (in the character of Donna Inez,
Juan’s “mathematical” mother). They urged that the manuscript be suppressed.
Murray was willing, and eager, to publish the piece, especially if some of the
“indelicacies” were omitted. But Byron would have none of his “damned cutting
and slashing"; the poem would succeed or fail on its own merits.
Byron,
exhausted by debauchery, cut and slashed in his personal life, getting rid of
his harem. In early April 1819 at the Benzoni conversazione, he encountered the
Countess Teresa Guiccioli, whom he had met casually on his 30th birthday at the
Countess Albrizzi’s. Now 19, she had been married for just over a year to a
rich count of 58. A strong mutual attraction quickly developed between Byron
and Teresa. Having given up “miscellaneous harlotry,” he settled for “strictest
adultery” as cavalier servente to Teresa, his “last attachment.” For the next
four years, until his departure for Greece in July 1823, they lived in several
Italian cities and towns.
On
July 15, 1819, Murray, after some hesitation, cautiously published 1,500 copies
of the first two cantos of Don Juan. Missing were Byron’s savage “Dedication”
to the poet laureate Robert Southey (first published in The Works of Lord
Byron, 1832) and the names of the author and publisher on the title page; only
the printer, Thomas Davison, was identified, as required by English law. By
tacitly admitting, through anonymous publication, that Don Juan was
disreputable, Murray intensified the outcry against the work. The critics hit
back with a fury virtually unprecedented, vilifying both poet and poem. Typical
was the review in Blackwood’s Magazine, which branded Byron as “a cool
unconcerned fiend” who derided love, honor, patriotism, and religion in his
“filthy and impious poem"; the “coldblooded mockery” of his injured wife
was “brutally, fiendishly, inexpiably mean.” Not all the reviews were negative.
In a pseudonymous Letter to the Right Hon. Lord Byron (1821), “John Bull” (John
Gibson Lockhart) encouraged him to “Stick to Don Juan: it is the only sincere
thing you have ever written; ... it is by far the most spirited, the most
straightforward, the most interesting, and the most poetical.” In a review
written in 1819 and published 1821, Goethe praised Don Juan as “a work of
boundless energy."
The
dazzling range of subjects, incidents, and moods in his “versified Aurora
Borealis” (Canto VII), and its geographical sweep, no less than its genre,
justify his claim that “My poem’s epic” (Canto I). The stanzas teem with
Byronic observations on liberty, tyranny, war, love, hypocrisy, cant, and much
more. The landscape stretches from Juan’s native Spain across the Mediterranean
to the Greek Cyclades, up to Constantinople and on to Russia, with a digression
to Kentucky, before stopping in England. Byron’s literary models include the
classical epics of Homer and Virgil and the Renaissance Italian epics of
Ariosto and Tasso. He drew, too, on satiric prose romances as written by
Françios Rabelais, Miguel de Cervantes, Jonathan Swift, and Laurence Sterne, and
on the picaresque novels of Henry Fielding. He humorously claims that his poem
will adhere to epic conventions, all arranged “With strict regard to
Aristotle’s rules” (Canto I), but, in fact, he writes a modern epic, indebted
to the older forms but not in thrall to them.
In
a “slight difference” from his “epic brethren,” Byron does not make Don Juan a
“labyrinth of fables” but a story that is “actually true” (Canto I), based, as
he told Murray, almost entirely on “real life—either my own—or from people I knew.”
For the discursive, digressive manner of Don Juan, Byron returned to the
versatile ottava rima he had first used in Beppo, ideally suited to the
conversational style of the “Improvisatore” (Canto XV). The rapidity of the
stanza facilitates the poem’s myriad changing tones—serious, cynical,
sentimental, humorous, satiric, bawdy—as the verse shifts from narrative to
commentary, from romance to burlesque, from banter to invective.
"I
want a hero,” Byron declares in the poem’s opening line, but finding that the
modern age does not provide a “true one,” he will “therefore take our ancient
friend Don Juan.” Whereas the legendary Juan is a libertine and a heartless
despoiler of women, deserving of his eternal perdition, Byron’s young don is
friendly, innately good, courteous, impulsive, and sensuous—more the seduced
than the seducer. He experiences shipwreck, slavery, war, dissipation, and
illness in his travels, gaining worldly wisdom and discretion as he goes.
Though he gradually becomes spoiled and blasé in the process, the Juan of Canto
XVI retains his good qualities from Canto I.
At
La Mira with Teresa and Allegra in September 1819 Byron proceeded with the
third canto of Don Juan. To Moore, his visitor in October, he presented the
manuscript of his memoirs, begun in Venice the previous year and not to be
published during Byron’s lifetime. They were intended to be “Memoranda—and not
Confessions,” containing, among other things, “a detailed account” of his
marriage and its “consequences.” Moore sold them to Murray; on May 17, 1824,
three days after news of Byron’s death reached England, Hobhouse and Murray,
over Moore’s objections, had the memoirs burned in Murray’s parlor to protect
Byron’s reputation.
In
February 1820, while in residence at the Palazzo Guiccioli, Byron sent Murray,
along with other works, the third and fourth cantos of Don Juan. Byron’s life
and writing in 1820 and 1821 evidenced a shared political theme. Influenced by
Teresa’s father, Count Ruggero Gamba Ghiselli, and his son, Count Pietro Gamba,
both ardent patriots, he began to take a serious interest in the Carbonari, one
of the secret revolutionary societies seeking to overthrow Austrian despotism.
In time Byron became an honorary Capo (Chief) of a workmen’s group of the
Carbonari; he supplied them with arms and made his house their arsenal. The
Austrian secret police increased their observation of Byron’s activities and
opened his mail. Uncertain about the future of Don Juan, he expended a portion
of his creative energy on a trio of historical tragedies based on political
subjects and modeled on neoclassical principles: Marino Faliero, Sardanapalus,
and The Two Foscari. These blank-verse plays were, he maintained, closet
dramas, not designed for the stage. Without Byron’s permission, Marino Faliero
was given seven performances at Drury Lane in April and May 1821, the only one
of his plays acted in his lifetime. Adaptations of Sardanapalus and Werner
(1823) enjoyed great success on the 19th-century stage.
With
the completion of The Two Foscari in July, Byron began work on Cain, A Mystery,
its subtitle an allusion to the medieval dramas on biblical themes and, he told
Moore, “in honour of what it probably will remain to the reader.” Grounding his
play in the Old Testament and 18th-century rationalism, Byron challenged
accepted religious beliefs in good, evil, death, and immortality.
Adam
and Eve inhabit a postlapsarian world with their sons, Cain and Abel;
daughters, Adah (Cain’s twin) and Zillah; and grandchild, Enoch, the son of
Cain and Adah. Cain appears as the first skeptic and a Romantic rebel, a blend
of the rational and the Promethean, defiantly, even blasphemously questioning
his parents’ views of God’s goodness and justice. When God violently rejects
his offering of fruit but accepts with gratitude Abel’s animal sacrifice, Cain
takes a stand for life, denouncing the death principle behind God’s tyrannical
“pleasure” in “The fumes of scorching flesh and smoking blood. “With tragic
irony Cain then sheds his brother’s blood in the human world’s first death.
Remorseful and repentant, he goes into exile accompanied by Adah and Enoch,
without railing against an unjust God.
In
September, amid the confusion of packing for his move to Pisa, Byron took up a
poem he had begun in May and immediately set aside. On October 4, he completed one of his greatest works,
The Vision of Judgment, a satiric riposte to Robert Southey’s A Vision of
Judgment, which had appeared in April. This solemn, sycophantic eulogy in limping
hexameters commemorates the death, burial, and supposed apotheosis of King
George III. In his preface, chiefly concerning the poem’s metrics, Southey
virulently attacked Byron (without naming him) as the leader of the “Satanic
school” of contemporary writers, whose works mocked religion, represented
“loathsome images of atrocities and horrors” and exhibited “a Satanic spirit of
pride and audacious impiety."
In
his “true dream” or vision, Byron, under the pseudonym “Quevedo Redivivus,”
trains his telescope on “the celestial gate” to espy the truth about George
III’s arrival there for judgment. He discovers that, during the mayhem caused
by Southey’s reading from his Vision of Judgment, the decrepit king simply
“slipped into Heaven.” Byron’s hatred of oppression finds a worthy target in
George III, whom Satan indicts as a warmonger and a symbol of tyranny in
England, America, and Europe. Byron also directs his spite at Southey’s poetry
and politics: “He had written much blank verse, and blanker prose, / And more
of both than any body knows.” A political apostate, Southey began as an
exponent of revolutionary views, only to become a voice of conservative
reaction: this “hearty antijacobin” had “turned his coat—and would have turned
his skin."
Byron
based Heaven and Earth, the “Mystery” he began in October, on Genesis 6:1-2,
which records that the “sons of God” (to Byron, angels) took as wives “the
daughters of men” (women descended from Cain, who were condemned to destruction
in the Flood). Through Japhet, the elect but troubled son of Noah, Byron
questions the doctrine of predestination, which had disturbed him all his life.
As in Cain, this drama asks why evil exists, since Jehovah is good. Aholibamah,
one of the women, articulates the familiar Byronic theme of human aspiration
for celestial existence free from the limitations of the body: “where is the
impiety of loving / Celestial natures?” (I.i).
In
Pisa, which he reached in November, Byron was drawn into a delightful circle of
friends that included Percy and Mary Shelley, Edward and Jane Williams, and
Shelley’s cousin Thomas Medwin. They were joined in mid January by the
flamboyant adventurer Edward John Trelawny.
On
December 19 Murray published Sardanapalus, The Two Foscari, and Cain in a
single volume. In a letter written January
26, 1822, Shelley proclaimed Cain “apocalyptic—it is a revelation not
before communicated to man.” His was a minority opinion. To John Gibson Lockhart, Cain was “a wicked
and blasphemous performance.” To the Gentleman’s Magazine, the play was
“neither more nor less than a series of wanton libels upon the Supreme Being
and His attributes.” Few critics embraced Sardanapalus and fewer still The Two
Foscari.
Byron
had placed his daughter Allegra in a convent school in Bagnacavallo in March
1821; on April 20, 1822 she died there at the age of five, after a brief
illness. Following Byron’s instructions, she was buried in Harrow Church.
In
July, the poet, critic, and editor Leigh Hunt accepted Shelley’s year-old
invitation, extended in Byron’s name, to come to Pisa with his family to help
edit a new literary journal. Despite Shelley’s death in July, plans went
forward to start The Liberal: Verse and Prose from the South, to be published
in London by Hunt’s brother, John. Byron contributed to each of its four issues
published in 1822 and 1823.
He
was also proceeding rapidly with Don Juan. After the erotic seraglio scenes in
the sixth canto, he began to exhibit a new gravity. His satire on war and its
false glory fills Cantos VII and VIII, on the siege of Ismail. In late September,
the remnants of the Pisan Circle relocated to Genoa. Within a week of his
arrival, Byron had completed the 10th canto of Don Juan, which carries the hero
to England, and started the 11th, with its satire on the shallowness and
hypocrisy of the English aristocracy.
The
first number of The Liberal appeared in mid-October, leading with Byron’s
Vision of Judgment. Though published under a pseudonym and without the
explanatory preface, the satire was immediately recognized as Byron’s and
deplored as slanderous, seditious, and impious. John Hunt was prosecuted for
libeling the late king; he remained the publisher of The Liberal but turned
printing duties over to the less radical printer C. H. Reynell.
Murray
found Don Juan, Cantos VI, VII, and VIII “so outrageously shocking” that he
refused to publish them. Byron responded by withdrawing from Murray and turning
to John Hunt as his publisher. Then, between December and January 1823 he
composed a slashing satire, The Age of Bronze (published by John Hunt in 1823).
As the title suggests, Byron voices disillusionment with the modern era, his
targets being both political and economic.
In
the summer of 1823 he told his guest “the most gorgeous” Marguerite, Countess
of Blessington, that “he who is only a poet has done little for mankind";
he would therefore “endeavour to prove in his own person that a poet may be a
soldier.” To this end he devoted himself to the Greek War of Independence from
the Turks, begun in March 1821. In May he was elected to the London Greek Committee,
recently formed to aid the struggling insurgents. After a reluctant farewell to
Teresa, he made good on his offer of personal assistance to the patriots by
sailing from Genoa on July 16, bound for Leghorn and Greece. He was accompanied
by Pietro Gamba, Trelawny, and a considerable sum of money and medical supplies
for the Greek cause; he also packed gold and scarlet uniforms and heroic
helmets for their landing on Greek shores. On August 3, they reached the island
of Cephalonia, then under British protection. Byron did not immediately commit
himself to any faction, preferring to wait for signs of unity in the Greek
effort. Intent on the war, he gave no time to poetry, adding nothing to the
stanzas of Don Juan, Canto XVII, he had started in Genoa.
Unknown
to him, John Hunt published Don Juan, Cantos VI, VII, and VIII in July. In the
July 1823 issue of Blackwood’s Magazine, “Timothy Tickler” (William Maginn)
attacked them as “mere filth” for abusing chastity, matrimony, monarchy, and
lawful government. In the September issue of Blackwood’s “Odoherty” (John
Gibson Lockhart) maintained that Cantos IX, X, and XI were, “without exception,
the first of Lord Byron’s works,” containing the finest specimens of his
serious poetry and of contemporary “ludicrous poetry"; Don Juan was
“destined to hold a permanent rank” in British literature.
In
November Byron agreed to loan 4,000 pounds to the Greek fleet for its
activation. In January 1824 he joined the moderate leader Prince Alexander
Mavrokordátos on the mainland in swampy Missolonghi. Wearing his red military
uniform, Byron was enthusiastically welcomed by shouts, salutes, and salvos,
and hailed as a “Messiah.” On the eve of his birthday, he turned once more to
poetry to express his feelings on his life and the principles of freedom; the
10 stanzas of “On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year” constitute one of
his last poems. Over the next three and a half months, all occasions—military,
political, physical, climatic, and amorous—seemed to conspire against him: his
leadership of a planned attack on the Turkish stronghold at Lepanto was
postponed for lack of soldiers; factions still prevented a unified war effort;
his constitution, weakened by years of dieting to combat congenital portliness,
deteriorated under the constant strain and the cold winter rains in
Missolonghi; the emotional frustration of his unrequited love for his handsome
15-year-old page boy, Loukas Chalandritsanos, seems to have inspired his final
poem (posthumously titled and published as “Love and Death”) which concludes,
“Nor can I blame thee, though it be my lot / To strongly, wrongly, vainly love
thee still.” Despite uncertainty and reverses, he continued to commit money and
energy to Mavrokordátos and the Greek cause.
In
March 1824, John and H.L. Hunt published the last complete sections of Don
Juan, Cantos XV and XVI. The Literary Gazette pronounced them “destitute of the
least glimmering of talent” and a “wretched” “piece of stuff altogether."
On
April 9 , having been soaked by a heavy rain while out riding, Byron suffered
fever and rheumatic pains. By the 12th he was seriously ill. Repeated bleedings
further debilitated him. On Easter Sunday, he entered a comatose state. At six
o’clock on the evening of Easter Monday, April 19, 1824, during a violent
electrical storm, Byron died.
In
memorial services throughout the country, he was proclaimed a national hero of
Greece. His death proved effective in uniting Greece against the enemy and in
eliciting support for its struggle from all parts of the civilized world. In
October 1827 British, French, and Russian forces destroyed the Turkish and
Egyptian fleets at Navarino, assuring Greek independence, which was
acknowledged by the sultan in 1829.
Byron’s
body arrived in England on June 29, and for two days lay in state in a house in
Great George Street, London. On Friday, 16 July 1824, Lord Byron was buried in
the family vault beneath the chancel of Hucknall Torkard Church near Newstead
Abbey.
The
fame to which Byron awoke in London in 1812 was spread rapidly throughout
Europe and the English-speaking world by scores of translations and editions.
His influence was pervasive and prolonged. Alfred de Musset was his disciple in
France, Alexander Pushkin in Russia, Heinrich Heine in Germany, Adam Mickiewicz
in Poland. His poetry inspired musical compositions by Hector Berlioz, Robert
Schumann, and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky; operas by Gaetano Donizetti and
Giuseppe Verdi; and paintings by J.M.W. Turner, John Martin, Ford Madox Brown,
and Eugène Delacroix. His spirit animated liberal revolutionary movements: most
of the officers executed following the unsuccessful 1825 Decembrist uprising in
Russia were Byronists; the Italian patriot Giuseppe Mazzini associated Byron
with the eternal struggle of the oppressed to be free. Shelley, Heine, and
others adopted Byron’s open-necked shirt, which he wears in Thomas Phillips’s
striking 1814 painting.
Philosophically
and stylistically, Byron stands apart from the other major Romantics. He was
the least insular, the most cosmopolitan of them. Poetic imagination was not
for him, as for them, the medium of revelation of ultimate truth. He wished
that Coleridge would “explain his Explanation” of his thought. He did not
embrace for long Wordsworth’s belief in the benevolence of nature, espouse
Shelley’s faith in human perfectibility, or experience Keats’s private vision.
Yet, as Leslie A. Marchand observes, “The core of his thinking and the basis of
his poetry is romantic aspiration,” and he evidences a “romantic zest for life
and experience.” In narrative skill, Byron has no superior in English poetry,
save Geoffrey Chaucer; as Ronald Bottrall notes, Byron, like his illustrious
predecessor, could “sum up a society and an era.” His subjects are fundamental
ones: life and death, growth and decay, humankind and nature. His “apotheosis of the commonplace” is, to
Edward E. Bostetter, “one of his great contributions to the language of
poetry.” Lacking the inhibitions of his contemporaries, Byron created verse
that is exuberant, spontaneous, expansive, digressive, concrete, lucid,
colloquial—in celebration of “unadorned reality.”
"I
was born for opposition,” Byron proclaimed in Don Juan, Canto XV. The
outstanding elements of his poetry both support his self-analysis and insure
his enduring reputation. As a major political and social satirist, he
repeatedly denounces war, tyranny, and hypocrisy. As an untiring champion of
liberty, he firmly believed that “Revolution / Alone can save the earth from
hell’s pollution”, a tenet he defended with his life.
The
last word properly belongs to Byron, who
captured his essence in Canto IV of Childe Harold:
But
I have lived, and have not lived in vain:
My
mind may lose its force, my blood its fire,
And
my frame perish even in conquering pain,
But
there is that within me which shall tire
Torture
and Time, and breathe when I expire [.]
Poetic
works
Byron
wrote prolifically. In 1832 his publisher, John Murray, released the complete
works in 14 duodecimo volumes, including a life by Thomas Moore. Subsequent editions
were released in 17 volumes, first published a year later, in 1833. An
extensive collection of his works, including early editions and annotated
manuscripts, is held within the John Murray Archive at the National Library of
Scotland in Edinburgh.
Don
Juan
Byron's
magnum opus, Don Juan, a poem spanning 17 cantos, ranks as one of the most
important long poems published in England since John Milton's Paradise Lost.
Byron published the first two cantos anonymously in 1819 after disputes with
his regular publisher over the shocking nature of the poetry. By this time, he
had been a famous poet for seven years, and when he self-published the
beginning cantos, they were well received in some quarters. The poem was then
released volume by volume through his regular publishing house. By 1822,
cautious acceptance by the public had turned to outrage, and Byron's publisher
refused to continue to publish the work. In Canto III of Don Juan, Byron
expresses his detestation for poets such as William Wordsworth and Samuel
Taylor Coleridge. In letters to Francis Hodgson, Byron referred to Wordsworth
as "Turdsworth".
Irish
Avatar
Byron
wrote the satirical pamphlet Irish Avatar after the royal visit by King George
IV to Ireland. Byron criticised the attitudes displayed by the Irish people
towards the Crown, an institution he perceived as oppressing them, and was
dismayed by the positive reception George IV received during his visit. In the
pamphlet, Byron lambasted Irish unionists and voiced muted support towards
nationalistic sentiments in Ireland.
Parthenon
marbles
Byron
was a bitter opponent of Lord Elgin's removal of the Parthenon marbles from
Athens and "reacted with fury" when Elgin's agent gave him a tour of
the Parthenon, during which he saw the spaces left by the missing part of the
frieze and metopes. He denounced Elgin's actions in his poem The Curse of
Minerva and in Canto II (stanzas XI–XV) of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.
Legacy
and influence
Byron's
image as the personification of the Byronic hero fascinated the public, and his
wife Annabella coined the term "Byromania" to refer to the commotion
surrounding him. His self-awareness and personal promotion are seen as a
beginning of what would become the modern rock star; he would instruct artists
painting portraits of him not to paint him with pen or book in hand, but as a
"man of action." While Byron first welcomed fame, he later turned
from it by going into voluntary exile from Britain.
Biographies
were distorted by the burning of Byron's Memoirs in the offices of his
publisher, John Murray, a month after his death and the suppression of details
of Byron's bisexuality by subsequent heads of the firm (which held the richest
Byron archive). As late as the 1950s, scholar Leslie Marchand was expressly
forbidden by the Murray company to reveal details of Byron's same-sex passions.
The
re-founding of the Byron Society in 1971 reflected the fascination that many
people had with Byron and his work. This society became very active, publishing
an annual journal. Thirty-six Byron Societies function throughout the world,
and an International Conference takes place annually.
Byron
exercised a marked influence on Continental literature and art, and his
reputation as a poet is higher in many European countries than in Britain, or
America, although not as high as in his time, when he was widely thought to be
the greatest poet in the world. Byron's writings also inspired many composers.
Over forty operas have been based on his works, in addition to three operas
about Byron himself (including Virgil Thomson's Lord Byron). His poetry was set
to music by many Romantic composers, including Beethoven, Schubert, Rossini,
Mendelssohn, Schumann and Carl Loewe. Among his greatest admirers was Hector
Berlioz, whose operas and Mémoires reveal Byron's influence. In the twentieth
century, Arnold Schoenberg set Byron's "Ode to Napoleon" to music.
In
April 2020, Byron was featured in a series of UK postage stamps issued by the
Royal Mail to commemorate the Romantic poets on the 250th anniversary of the
birth of William Wordsworth. Ten 1st class stamps were issued of all the major
British romantic poets, and each stamp included an extract from one of their
most popular and enduring works, with Byron's "She Walks in Beauty"
selected for the poet.
Byronic
hero
The
figure of the Byronic hero pervades much of his work, and Byron himself is
considered to epitomise many of the characteristics of this literary figure.
The use of a Byronic hero by many authors and artists of the Romantic movement
show Byron's influence during the 19th century and beyond, including the Brontë
sisters. His philosophy was more durably influential in continental Europe than
in England; Friedrich Nietzsche admired him, and the Byronic hero was echoed in
Nietzsche's Übermensch, or superman. Dimitrios Galanos in his funeral oration
for Lord Byron glorified him by saying “IMMORTAL BE THY MEMORY, THOU DESERVEDLY
BLESSED AND EVER-TO-BE-REMEMBERED HERO!!!” published in BENGAL HURKARU,
Calcutta, October 21, 1824. »
The
Byronic hero presents an idealised, but flawed character whose attributes
include: great talent; great passion; a distaste for society and social
institutions; a lack of respect for rank and privilege (although possessing
both); being thwarted in love by social constraint or death; rebellion; exile;
an unsavoury secret past; arrogance; overconfidence or lack of foresight; and,
ultimately, a self-destructive manner. These types of characters have since
become ubiquitous in literature and politics.
Legacy
of Lord Byron
Byron’s
writings are more patently autobiographic than even those of his fellow
self-revealing Romantics. Upon close examination, however, the paradox of his
complex character can be resolved into understandable elements. Byron early
became aware of reality’s imperfections, but the skepticism and cynicism bred
of his disillusionment coexisted with a lifelong propensity to seek ideal
perfection in all of life’s experiences. Consequently, he alternated between
deep-seated melancholy and humorous mockery in his reaction to the disparity
between real life and his unattainable ideals. The melancholy of Childe Harold
and the satiric realism of Don Juan are thus two sides of the same coin: the
former runs the gamut of the moods of Romantic despair in reaction to life’s
imperfections, while the latter exhibits the humorous irony attending the
unmasking of the hypocritical facade of reality.
Byron
was initially diverted from his satiric-realistic bent by the success of Childe
Harold. He followed this up with the Oriental tales, which reflected the gloomy
moods of self-analysis and disenchantment of his years of fame. In Manfred and
the third and fourth cantos of Childe Harold he projected the brooding remorse
and despair that followed the debacle of his ambitions and love affairs in
England. But gradually the relaxed and freer life in Italy opened up again the
satiric vein, and he found his forte in the mock-heroic style of Italian verse
satire. The ottava rima form, which Byron used in Beppo and Don Juan, was
easily adaptable to the digressive commentary, and its final couplet was
ideally suited to the deflation of sentimental pretensions:
Alas!
for Juan and Haidée! they were
So
loving and so lovely—till then never,
Excepting
our first parents, such a pair
Had
run the risk of being damn’d for ever;
And
Haidée, being devout as well as fair
Had,
doubtless, heard about the Stygian river,
And
hell and purgatory—but forgot
Just
in the very crisis she should not.
Byron’s
plays are not as highly regarded as his poetry. He provided Manfred, Cain, and
the historical dramas with characters whose exalted rhetoric is replete with
Byronic philosophy and self-confession, but these plays are truly successful
only insofar as their protagonists reflect aspects of Byron’s own personality.
Byron
was a superb letter writer, conversational, witty, and relaxed, and the
20th-century publication of many previously unknown letters has further
enhanced his literary reputation. Whether dealing with love or poetry, he cuts
through to the heart of the matter with admirable incisiveness, and his apt and
amusing turns of phrase make even his business letters fascinating.
Byron
showed only that facet of his many-sided nature that was most congenial to each
of his friends. To Hobhouse he was the facetious companion, humorous, cynical,
and realistic, while to Edleston, and to most women, he could be tender,
melancholy, and idealistic. But this weakness was also Byron’s strength. His
chameleon-like character was engendered not by hypocrisy but by sympathy and
adaptability, for the side he showed was a real if only partial revelation of
his true self. And this mobility of character permitted him to savour and to
record the mood and thought of the moment with a sensitivity denied to those
tied to the conventions of consistency.
Major
works
Hours
of Idleness (1807) , Lachin y Gair (1807) , English Bards and Scotch Reviewers
(1809) , Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Cantos I & II (1812) ,The Giaour
(1813) (text on Wikisource) ,The Bride of Abydos (1813) , he Corsair (1814)
(text on Wikisource) , Lara, A Tale (1814) (text on Wikisource) , Hebrew
Melodies (1815) , The Siege of Corinth (1816) (text on Wikisource)
Parisina
(1816) (text on Wikisource) , The Prisoner of Chillon (1816) (text on
Wikisource) ,The Dream (1816) (text on Wikisource) ,Prometheus (1816) (text on
Wikisource),Darkness (1816) (text on Wikisource) ,Manfred (1817) (text on
Wikisource) ,The Lament of Tasso (1817) , Beppo (1818) (text on Wikisource)
Childe
Harold's Pilgrimage (1818) (text on Wikisource) , Don Juan (1819–1824;
incomplete on Byron's death in 1824) (text on Wikisource) ,Mazeppa (1819) ,The
Prophecy of Dante (1819) ,Marino Faliero (1820) ,Sardanapalus (1821) ,The Two
Foscari (1821) ,Cain (1821) ,The Vision of Judgment (1821) ,Heaven and Earth
(1821) , Werner (1822) , The Age of Bronze (1823) , The Island (1823) (text on
Wikisource) , The Deformed Transformed (1824) , Letters and journals, vol. 1
(1830) , Letters and journals, vol. 2 (1830)
Selected
shorter lyric poems
Maid
of Athens, ere we part (1810) (text on Wikisource) , And thou art dead (1812)
(text on Wikisource) , She Walks in Beauty (1814) (text on Wikisource) , My
Soul is Dark (1815) (text on Wikisource) , The Destruction of Sennacherib
(1815) (text on Wikisource) , Monody on the Death of the Right Hon. R. B.
Sheridan (1816) (text on Wikisource) , Fare Thee Well (1816) (text on
Wikisource) , So, we'll go no more a roving (1817) (text on Wikisource)
When
We Two Parted (1817) (text on Wikisource) , Ode on Venice (1819) (text on
Wikisource)
Stanzas
(1819)
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