WHY WE NEED a NEW TEXT of BEPPO Peter Cochran
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Byron's Romantic Adventures in Spain
1 BYRON’S ROMANTIC ADVENTURES IN SPAIN RICHARD A. CARDWELL UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM I On the July 2nd 1809, after several delays with the weather, Byron set off from Falmouth on the Lisbon Packet, The Princess Elizabeth , on his Grand Tour of the Mediterranean world not controlled by France. Four and a half days later he landed in Lisbon. From there, across a war-ravaged Portugal and Spain, he headed on horseback to Seville and Cádiz, accompanied by Hobhouse, details recorded in the latter’s diary. But we know little of Byron’s stay in Seville and Cádiz save what he relates in a letter to his mother, Catherine Byron, from Gibraltar dated August 11th 1809. It is ironic that Byron never saw her in life again. The first part of the letter reads as follows: Seville is a beautiful town, though the streets are narrow they are clean, we lodged in the house of two Spanish unmarried ladies, who possess six houses in Seville, and gave me a curious specimen of Spanish manners. They are women of character, and the eldest a fine woman, the youngest pretty but not so good a figure as Donna Josepha, the freedom of woman which is general here astonished me not a little, and in the course of further observation I find that reserve is not the characteristic of the Spanish belles, who are on general very handsome, with large black eyes, and very fine forms. – The eldest honoured your unworthy son with very particular attention, embracing him with great tenderness at parting (I was there but three days) after cutting off a lock of his hair, & presenting him with one of her own about three feet in length, which I send, and beg you will retain till my return. -
Poems About Poets
1 BYRON’S POEMS ABOUT POETS Some of the funniest of Byron’s poems spring with seeming spontaneity from his pen in the middle of his letters. Much of this section comes from correspondence, though there is some formal verse. Several pieces are parodies, some one-off squibs, some full-length. Byron’s distaste for most of the poets of his day shines through, with the recurrent and well-worn traditional joke that their books will end either as stuffing in hatshops, wrapped around pastries, or as toilet-tissue. Byron admired the English poets of the past – the Augustans especially – much more than he did any of his contemporaries. Of “the Romantic Movement” he knew no more than did any of the other writers supposed now to have been members of it. Southey he loathed, as a dreadful doppelgänger – see below. Of Wordsworth he also had a low opinion, based largely on The Excursion – to the ambitions of which Don Juan can be regarded as a riposte (there are as many negative comments about Wordsworth in Don Juan as there are about Southey). He was as abusive of Keats as it’s possible to be, and only relented (as he said), when Shelley showed him Hyperion. Of the poetry of his friend Shelley he was very guarded indeed, and compensated by defending Shelley’s moral reputation. Blake he seems not to have known (“Blake” was him the name of a well-known Fleet Street barber). The only poet of whom his judgement and modern estimate coincide is Coleridge: he was strong in his admiration for The Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, and Christabel; about the conversational poems he seems blank, and he feigns total incomprehension of the Biographia Literaria (see below). -
BYRON COURTS ANNABELLA MILBANKE, AUGUST 1813-DECEMBER 1814 Edited by Peter Cochran
BYRON COURTS ANNABELLA MILBANKE, AUGUST 1813-DECEMBER 1814 Edited by Peter Cochran If anyone doubts that some people, at least, have a programmed-in tendency to self-destruction, this correspondence should convince them. ———————— Few things are more disturbing (or funnier) than hearing someone being ironical, while pretending to themselves that they aren’t being ironical. The best or worst example is Macbeth, speaking of the witches: Infected be the air whereon they ride, And damned all those that trust them! … seeming unconscious of the fact that he trusts them, and is about to embark, encouraged by their words, on a further career of murder that will end in his death. “When I find ambiguities in your expression,” writes Annabella to Byron on August 6th 1814, “I am certain that they are created by myself, since you evidently desire at all times to be simple and perspicuous”. Annabella (born 1792) is vain, naïve, inexperienced, and “romantic”, but she’s also highly intelligent, and it’s impossible not to suspect that she knows his “ambiguities” are not “created by” herself, and that she recognizes in him someone who is the least “perspicuous” and most given to “ambiguities” who ever lived. The frequency with which both she and she quote Macbeth casually to one another (as well as, in Byron’s letters to Lady Melbourne, Richard III ) seems a subconscious way of signalling that they both know that nothing they’re about will come to good. “ … never yet was such extraordinary behaviour as her’s” is Lady Melbourne’s way of describing Annabella on April 30th 1814: I imagine she’d say the same about Byron. -
Turkish Tales” – the Siege of Corinth and Parisina – Were Still to Come
1 THE CORSAIR and LARA These two poems may make a pair: Byron’s note to that effect, at the start of Lara, leaves the question to the reader. I have put them together to test the thesis. Quite apart from the discrepancy between the heroine’s hair-colour (first pointed out by E.H.Coleridge) it seems to me that the protagonists are different men, and that to see the later poem as a sequel to and political development of the earlier, is not of much use in understanding either. Lara is a man of uncontrollable violence, unlike Conrad, whose propensity towards gentlemanly self-government is one of two qualities (the other being his military incompetence) which militates against the convincing depiction of his buccaneer’s calling. Conrad, offered rescue by Gulnare, almost turns it down – and is horrified when Gulnare murders Seyd with a view to easing his escape. On the other hand, Lara, astride the fallen Otho (Lara, 723-31) would happily finish him off. Henry James has a dialogue in which it is imagined what George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda would do, once he got to the Holy Land.1 The conclusion is that he’d drink lots of tea. I’m working at an alternative ending to Götterdämmerung, in which Brunnhilde accompanies Siegfried on his Rheinfahrt, sees through Gunther and Gutrune at once, poisons Hagen, and gets bored with Siegfried, who goes off to be a forest warden while she settles down in bed with Loge, because he’s clever and amusing.2 By the same token, I think that Gulnare would become irritated with Conrad, whose passivity and lack of masculinity she’d find trying. -
1 Byron: Six Poems of Separation
1 Byron: Six Poems of Separation edited by Peter Cochran If one’s marriage were to collapse in humiliating, semi-public circumstances, and if one were in part to blame for its collapse, one’s reaction would probably be to maintain a discreet and (one would hope) a dignified silence, and to hope that the thing might blow over in a year or so. Byron’s reaction was write, and publish, poetry about it while it was still collapsing. The first two of these poems were written in London – the first is to his wife, and the next about and to her friend and confidante Mrs Clermont – before he left England, on Thursday April 25th 1816. The next three were written in Switzerland after his departure, and are addressed to his half-sister Augusta. The last one is again to his wife. They show violent contrasts in style and tone (the Epistle to Augusta is Byron’s first poem in ottava rima), and strange, contrasting aspects of Byron’s nature. That he should wish them published at all is perhaps worrying. The urge to confess without necessarily repenting was, however, deep within him. Fare Thee Well! with its elaborate air of injured innocence, and its implication that Annabella’s reasons for leaving him remain incomprehensible, sorts ill with what we know of his behaviour during the disintegration of their marriage in the latter months of 1815. John Gibson Lockhart was moved, five years later, to protest: … why, then, did you, who are both a gentleman and a nobleman, act upon this the most delicate occasion, in all probability, your life was ever to present, as if you had been neither a nobleman nor a gentleman, but some mere overweeningly conceited poet? 1 Of A Sketch from Private Life , William Gifford, Byron’s “Literary Father”, wrote to Murray: It is a dreadful picture – Caravagio outdone in his own way. -
1815 1817 George Gordon, Lord Byron 1788-1824
http://www.englishworld2011.info/ GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON / 607 (by which last I mean neither rhythm nor metre) this genus comprises as its species, gaming; swinging or swaying on a chair or gate; spitting over a bridge; smoking; snuff-taking; tete-a-tete quarrels after dinner between husband and wife; conning word by word all the advertisements of the Daily Advertiser in a public house on a rainy day, etc. etc. etc. 1815 1817 GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON 1788-1824 In his History of English Literature, written in the late 1850s, the French critic Hip- polyte Taine gave only a few condescending pages to Wordsworth, Coleridge, Percy Shelley, and Keats and then devoted a long chapter to Lord Byron, "the greatest and most English of these artists; he is so great and so English that from him alone we shall learn more truths of his country and of his age than from all the rest together." This comment reflects the fact that Byron had achieved an immense European rep- utation during his own lifetime, while admirers of his English contemporaries were much more limited in number. Through much of the nineteenth century he contin- ued to be rated as one of the greatest of English poets and the very prototype of literary Bomanticism. His influence was manifested everywhere, among the major poets and novelists (Balzac and Stendhal in France, Pushkin and Dostoyevsky in Russia, and Melville in America), painters (especially Delacroix), and composers (including Beethoven and Berlioz). Yet even as poets, painters, and composers across Europe and the Americas struck Byronic attitudes, Byron's place within the canon of English Bomantic poetry was becoming insecure. -
Don Juan from Norton.Pdf
http://www.englishworld2011.info/ DON JUAN / 669 [MANFRED expires.] ABBOT He's gone—his soul hath ta'en its earthless flight- Whither? I dread to think—but he is gone. 1816-17 1817 Don juan Byron began his masterpiece (pronounced in the English fashion, Don Joo-nn) in July 1818, published it in installments beginning with cantos 1 and 2 in 1819, and continued working on it almost until his death. Initially he improvised the poem from episode to episode. "I have no plan," he said, "I had no plan; but I had or have materials." The work was composed with remarkable speed (the 888 lines of canto 13, for example, were dashed off within a week), and it aims at the effect of improvisation rather than of artful compression; it asks to be read rapidly, at a con- versational pace. The poem breaks off with the sixteenth canto, but even in its unfinished state Don Juan is the longest satirical poem, and indeed one of the longest poems of any kind, in English. Its hero, the Spanish libertine, had in the original legend been superhuman in his sexual energy and wickedness. Throughout Byron's version the unspoken but persistent joke is that this archetypal lady-killer of European legend is in fact more acted upon than active. Unfailingly amiable and well intentioned, he is guilty largely of youth, charm, and a courteous and compliant spirit. The women do all the rest. The chief models for the poem were the Italian seriocomic versions of medieval chivalric romances; the genre had been introduced by Pulci in the fifteenth century and was adopted by Ariosto in his Orlando Furioso (1532). -
Don Byron and the Moral North
Don Byron and The Moral North ANDREW GURR N a letter of 1812 to Lady Melbourne Byron wrote, about a piece of scandal they were exchanging notes on, T never I laughed at P. (by the bye, this is an initial which might puzzle posterity when our correspondence bursts forth in the 20th century)'. It puzzled the editor of Lord Byron's Correspondence1 in which the letter was first printed, in 1922, and has continued to puzzle scholars since then. Lady Melbourne, mother-in-law of Caroline Lamb, whom Byron didn't marry, and aunt of Annabella Milbanke, whom he did, shared an intimate friendship with Byron, despite the problems created by her relatives. The cheer• fully egocentric parenthesis in the letter quoted is characteristic of this intimacy, as it is of the cynicism of the society in which they lived, and of the pleasure Byron took in hiding behind all kinds of masks of obscurity and deliberate puzzlement. Byron has defeated his biographers, largely because of this enigmatic quality which made everything he said a posture and at best a half-truth. Even Leslie Marchand's splendidly thorough biography offers more a chronicle than an analysis of its subject. Its author specifically denies that he has any 'interpretation' of Byron's character and actions — T have no thesis and have consciously avoided formulating one'.2 I begin with this because Don Juan, Byron's greatest poem, derives its nature in a more complex and yet precisely ascertainable way from its author's career, his mentality, his fame and his attitude to his fame, than perhaps any great poem written in English. -
Manfred Lord Byron (1788–1824)
Manfred Lord Byron (1788–1824) Dramatis Personæ MANFRED CHAMOIS HUNTER ABBOT OF ST. MAURICE MANUEL HERMAN WITCH OF THE ALPS ARIMANES NEMESIS THE DESTINIES SPIRITS, ETC. The scene of the Drama is amongst the Higher Alps—partly in the Castle of Manfred, and partly in the Mountains. ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’ Act I Scene I MANFRED alone.—Scene, a Gothic Gallery. Time, Midnight. Manfred THE LAMP must be replenish’d, but even then It will not burn so long as I must watch. My slumbers—if I slumber—are not sleep, But a continuance of enduring thought, 5 Which then I can resist not: in my heart There is a vigil, and these eyes but close To look within; and yet I live, and bear The aspect and the form of breathing men. But grief should be the instructor of the wise; 10 Sorrow is knowledge: they who know the most Must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth, The Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life. Philosophy and science, and the springs Of wonder, and the wisdom of the world, 15 I have essay’d, and in my mind there is A power to make these subject to itself— But they avail not: I have done men good, And I have met with good even among men— But this avail’d not: I have had my foes, 20 And none have baffled, many fallen before me— But this avail’d not:—Good, or evil, life, Powers, passions, all I see in other beings, Have been to me as rain unto the sands, Since that all—nameless hour. -
"Don Juan". Nancy Clark Victory Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College
Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses Graduate School 1998 "To Play With Fixities and Definites": Byron's Fanciful Real World Games in "Don Juan". Nancy Clark Victory Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses Recommended Citation Victory, Nancy Clark, ""To Play With Fixities and Definites": Byron's Fanciful Real World Games in "Don Juan"." (1998). LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses. 6766. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses/6766 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses by an authorized administrator of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. INFORMATION TO USERS This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilm master. UMI films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter face, while others may be from any type of computer printer. The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleedthrough, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely afreet reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand comer and continuing from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps. -
Don Juan Study Guide
Don Juan Study Guide © 2017 eNotes.com, Inc. or its Licensors. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this work covered by the copyright hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, Web distribution or information storage retrieval systems without the written permission of the publisher. Summary Don Juan is a unique approach to the already popular legend of the philandering womanizer immortalized in literary and operatic works. Byron’s Don Juan, the name comically anglicized to rhyme with “new one” and “true one,” is a passive character, in many ways a victim of predatory women, and more of a picaresque hero in his unwitting roguishness. Not only is he not the seductive, ruthless Don Juan of legend, he is also not a Byronic hero. That role falls more to the narrator of the comic epic, the two characters being more clearly distinguished than in Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. In Beppo: A Venetian Story, Byron discovered the appropriateness of ottava rima to his own particular style and literary needs. This Italian stanzaic form had been exploited in the burlesque tales of Luigi Pulci, Francesco Berni, and Giovanni Battista Casti, but it was John Hookham Frere’s (1817-1818) that revealed to Byron the seriocomic potential for this flexible form in the satirical piece he was planning. The colloquial, conversational style of ottava rima worked well with both the narrative line of Byron’s mock epic and the serious digressions in which Byron rails against tyranny, hypocrisy, cant, sexual repression, and literary mercenaries. -
The Novelistic Poem and the Poetical Novel: Towards A
THE NOVELISTIC POEM AND THE POETICAL NOVEL: TOWARDS A THEORY OF GENERIC INTERRELATION IN THE ROMANTIC PERIOD by Nick Bujak A dissertation submitted to Johns Hopkins University in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Baltimore, Maryland July 2014 © 2014 Nick Bujak All Rights Reserved Abstract This dissertation examines the shifting set of formal and conceptual relations that have structured the intertwined development and reception of “the novel” and “poetry” since the Romantic period. In Part One, I focus on the continuing rise of the novel in the age of best-selling poetry, arguing that narrative poetry and the novel participated in a shared history of narrative innovation. I take the popular and formally innovative poems of Walter Scott as a particularly important example of poetry’s contribution to this shared history. Specifically, I argue that Scott’s knowledge of the ballad tradition and his modern experiments with poetry in that mode enabled him to introduce narrative techniques into the novel that prepare the way for the deployment of free indirect discourse in the novels of Jane Austen and her successors. More broadly, I attempt to describe a theory of generic interrelation that is capable of identifying and explaining the interrelated formal development of works written during the Romantic period. In Part Two, I work to recover and analyze the complex history of perceptions about genre from the Romantic period through the twentieth century. Since the Romantic period itself, many thinkers have been interested in identifying what is essentially poetic about poetry, and, as a closely related matter, in determining what can distinguish poetry from prose and the novel.