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A Roman Standard: Byron, Ancient Rome, and Literary Decline

Jonathan Sachs

in Romantic Antiquity: Rome in the British Imagination, 1789-1832

This chapter evaluates the use of Roman precedent in Byron's understanding of the decline of literature and literary standards, of ancient civilization, and of the self. In his Letter to John Murray, ... More

This chapter evaluates the use of Roman precedent in Byron's understanding of the decline of literature and literary standards, of ancient civilization, and of the self. In his Letter to John Murray, Byron uses ancient Roman precedents and the transition from republic to empire to construct a model of literary decline, one which he then applies to the contemporary scene. Byron's invocation of Roman precedents in the Pope controversy to revalue negatively the Romantic movement shows Byron reaching behind his dissatisfaction with Romantic poetics to invoke a Roman standard. The same emphasis on decline seen in Byron's advocacy of Pope also forms a dominant theme in Childe Harold, canto four. Here, a focus on Byron's engagement with classical Roman authors and the decline of the Roman republic shows how Byron's sense of decline is more than self‐mythologizing and represents instead a post‐Waterloo historical consciousness. Together, both sections affirm the centrality of Rome for Byron's sense of self and for his understanding of literary history, while also revealing uneven and dissonant qualities within the category “Romantic” itself.Less

‘… and found myself famous’

Mary O’Connell

in Byron and John Murray: A Poet and His Publisher

This chapter describes John Murray’s publication strategy for Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and discusses the initial tumult of success and fame which greeted the appearance of the first two cantos of ... More

This chapter describes John Murray’s publication strategy for Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and discusses the initial tumult of success and fame which greeted the appearance of the first two cantos of the poem. This is followed by an analysis of the opening cantos of Childe Harold which highlights the extent to which Byron dwells on the fear of being forgotten.Less

Reshaping the Romantic Canon from the Margins: The Medial Construction of ‘Byron’ in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

Ralf Haekel

in Byron and Marginality

Byron has always been considered to belong to the canon of Romantic literature, but the place he occupies in the canon has been a special and recently a marginalised one. Byron’s phenomenal success ... More

Byron has always been considered to belong to the canon of Romantic literature, but the place he occupies in the canon has been a special and recently a marginalised one. Byron’s phenomenal success and his special position within literary history is mainly the result of what is called the medial construction of “Byron”. The melancholic Byronic hero of the earlier works together with the narrative voice lead to rhetorical constructions of “Byron” that easily cross authorial and medial boundaries and turn into the Byronic vampire in Polidori’s novella, in the theatre and in the opera. In this reading of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Byron is shown as the construct of medial and public perception.Less

Out of Romanticism: Byron and Romance

Anna Camilleri

in Byron and Marginality

This essay considers Romance as a genre not only etymologically related to the literary epoch of Romanticism, but as forming a locus for Romantic interconnectedness. The central contention is that ... More

This essay considers Romance as a genre not only etymologically related to the literary epoch of Romanticism, but as forming a locus for Romantic interconnectedness. The central contention is that through his writing of and correspondence about the Romantic genre, Byron’s position as a writer central to the Romantic impulse can be ascertained. This essay seeks neither to fully equate Byron’s verse Romances with those of Coleridge, Scott or Moore, instead it tries to more fully articulate the centrality of Byron’s place as a writer of Romance within the Romantic canon than has been previously recognised. The essay is based on the premise that Byron’s poetry evidences the practice of genre hybridisation that was familiar to him through his readings of Goethe and A.W. Schlegel.Less

Lord Byron, Manuscript Poet

Michelle Levy

in Literary Manuscript Culture in Romantic Britain

Chapter 4 considers the most popular and commercially successful of the English Romantic poets, Lord Byron, to explicate his continuous and deep engagement with manuscript culture. It begins by ... More

Chapter 4 considers the most popular and commercially successful of the English Romantic poets, Lord Byron, to explicate his continuous and deep engagement with manuscript culture. It begins by offering a quantitative assessment of his use of print publication and manuscript dissemination. Throughout, from his earliest poetic efforts to his last, we find that Byron encountered difficulty in preparing his verse for print and relied on manuscript to circulate his poetry, particularly his short verse. The chapter considers his earliest four verse collections, and then studies the manuscript revisions to the poem that launched his fame – Cantos I and II of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Both examples demonstrate Byron’s early struggle to transition from narrower to wider audiences without compromising his poetic candour. Afterwards, Byron avoided these time-consuming processes of rearrangement and revision by separating his writing into two categories: the handwritten short poems he entrusted to members of his coterie and the longer poems he wrote for the public. This chapter demonstrates Byron’s use of manuscript at all stages of his career, confounding the notion that he can be regarded exclusively as a print author and elucidating the sources of his discomfort with print.Less

At Sea

Clare Pettitt

in Time Travelers: Victorian Encounters with Time and History

In the face of the increasing complexity, disciplinization and nationalization of knowledge in the nineteenth century, the sea can do useful symbolic work in maintaining the possibility of a ... More

In the face of the increasing complexity, disciplinization and nationalization of knowledge in the nineteenth century, the sea can do useful symbolic work in maintaining the possibility of a universalized global history. This chapter starts with Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, linking its attack on chronology and teleological history to later scientific developments, to argue that nineteenth-century “historicism” was not oppositional to Romantic modes of thinking, but rather developed out of the very ideas of fragmentation and retrieval that fascinated Byron. It goes on to survey the impact of unknown forms of life discovered on the ocean floor by telegraph engineers laying undersea cables and by scientists on the Challenger Expedition.Less

Classic Pas—Sans Flaw: Byron, Shelley, and the Balletic Body

Betsy Winakur Tontiplaphol

in The Pointe of the Pen: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and the Balletic Imagination

Chapter 3 considers the degree to which virtuosic display had, despite Noverre’s revolutionary emphasis on expressivity, endured as a feature of balletic performance; indeed, the value of technical ... More

Chapter 3 considers the degree to which virtuosic display had, despite Noverre’s revolutionary emphasis on expressivity, endured as a feature of balletic performance; indeed, the value of technical flair increased when Napoleon sought to establish meritocracy at the Paris Opera. Ballet’s newly virtuosic bodies exerted a profound influence on Byron and Shelley, whose exposure to ballet was extensive in the 1810s, when Byron managed the Drury Lane Theater and Shelley, a close affiliate of prolific dance critic Leigh Hunt, frequented the ballet both in England and, later, Italy. Chapter 3 argues that Byron and Shelley were inspired by, respectively, the contemporaneous ballet world’s intense regard for the virtuosity of the solo performer and its concomitant reliance on the collective brilliance of the corps de ballet, the dance troupe’s increasingly proficient plural “body.” It concentrates on Byron’s and Shelley’s longer works, including Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Don Juan, and Prometheus Unbound.Less

Byron and the Noonday Demons

Mary Hurst

in Byron's Ghosts: The Spectral, the Spiritual and the Supernatural

This chapter explores the theological undercurrents in Byron’s verse, focusing on the subject of infernal ghosts and the condition of melancholic boredom traditionally known as acedia. It argues ... More

This chapter explores the theological undercurrents in Byron’s verse, focusing on the subject of infernal ghosts and the condition of melancholic boredom traditionally known as acedia. It argues that, while we have come to see the dull violence of ennui as a wholly secular psychological state, it is in fact a silhouette of the Greek and Scholastic theological notion of acedia, which has been loosely translated from the term that describes a spiritual condition of the Desert Fathers, understood as ‘the noonday Demon’. A new reading of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, shows that the spiritual origins of acedia provide a vocabulary that foreshadows aspects of Byron and his poetry, which secular terms such as melancholy and ennui do not. Thus, an analysis of Byron’s descriptions of boredom and ennui, cannot get very far without the spiritual vocabulary of demons.Less

Diodati

in Byron in Geneva: That Summer of 1816

Lord Byron's late arrival in Geneva was not in accord with his habitual, temperamental preference for a leisurely mode of travel. The Shelley party took the direct route to Switzerland by going ... More

Lord Byron's late arrival in Geneva was not in accord with his habitual, temperamental preference for a leisurely mode of travel. The Shelley party took the direct route to Switzerland by going through France. Byron opted to sail from Dover to Ostend, making his way to Cologne before following the Rhine down to the Swiss border. With him were William Fletcher, who had worked on the Newstead estate, Robert Rushton, the son of one of his tenants, a Swiss called Berger, and John Polidori, his own private physician. From Murten, Byron probably took the road to Lausanne and then made his way towards Geneva along the lake, arriving at the Hôtel d'Angleterre on May 25, 1816, exactly a month after he had embarked on his journey. During his travel, Byron was able to compose a poem entitled Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.Less

Coppet

in Byron in Geneva: That Summer of 1816

Lord Byron and the Shelley party were not contented at the Hôtel d'Angleterre, not least because it was expensive and housed many inquisitive compatriots. They soon found places to live in Cologny, ... More

Lord Byron and the Shelley party were not contented at the Hôtel d'Angleterre, not least because it was expensive and housed many inquisitive compatriots. They soon found places to live in Cologny, not far from each other. Byron chose a particularly beautiful house known as the villa Diodati and moved in there four days after signing an agreement to rent the property on June 6, 1816. Ten days before he transferred to Diodati, the Shelley party had, with the help of John Polidori, found a house almost directly down the hillside from the villa and much closer to the lake. Whereas his relations with Claire Clairmont had deteriorated, Byron's friendship with Percy Bysshe Shelley only got better. Shelley was able to temporarily transform Byron into a Wordsworthian worshipper of nature, as seen in the latter's poem entitled Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.Less

At the Margins of Europe: Byron’s East Revisited and The Giaour

Stephen Minta

in Byron and Marginality

Greece, in Byron’s work and life, seems so central, so symbolically tied to ideas of freedom and commitment, that it is easy to forget how marginal Greece was in the Europe of Byron’s time. Byron’s ... More

Greece, in Byron’s work and life, seems so central, so symbolically tied to ideas of freedom and commitment, that it is easy to forget how marginal Greece was in the Europe of Byron’s time. Byron’s East is an anomalous composite, framed by four elements: the imperial force of the Ottoman Empire, the framing structure of classical Greece, a loosely defined Albanian presence operating both within the limits of the Ottoman Empire, but in some ways resistant to it, and what can be described as ‘modern Greece’. In reconstructing this network of Turkish/European oppositional attitudes, we can see with greater clarity how Byron approached his Giaour and to what extent Byron’s difficulties in escaping from the traditional representation of classical Greece are only partially resolved in Childe Harold.Less

Frightening Tales

in Byron in Geneva: That Summer of 1816

Percy Bysshe Shelley died in July 1822, but Lord Byron would follow him two years later. Byron settled in Venice in November 1816 and fell in love with the twenty–one–year–old Teresa Guiccioli. He ... More

Percy Bysshe Shelley died in July 1822, but Lord Byron would follow him two years later. Byron settled in Venice in November 1816 and fell in love with the twenty–one–year–old Teresa Guiccioli. He continued to produce new work, finishing Manfred after his arrival in Italy followed by a whole series of more austere dramas, including the highly controversial Cain. Despite his evolving thought on how poetry should be written, Byron completed the fourth and final canto of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage while he was in Venice. He also showed strong interest in the outbreak of the Greek war of independence in 1821. In July 1823 he went to Greece. On April 19, 1824 he died of fever at the age of thirty–six.Less

Reconciliation

in Byron in Geneva: That Summer of 1816

While Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley were away on the trip round the lake of Geneva, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and Claire Clairmont were left to keep themselves busy at Diodati. Mary had begun ... More

While Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley were away on the trip round the lake of Geneva, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and Claire Clairmont were left to keep themselves busy at Diodati. Mary had begun writing Frankenstein and made fair copies of Byron's poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. John Polidori was visiting the two women on a daily basis and often dined with them. Upon his return Byron would experience a profound change in his social life due to his encounter with Germaine de Staël, who had returned from Italy to her château at Coppet. Madame de Staël was a major celebrity in Europe owing to her father's fame, her suffering at the hands of Napoleon of France, and her political activity. Her warm welcome and her ability to make Byron feel completely at home made the poet continue to visit Coppet, in spite of the occasional encounter with people such as Elizabeth Hervey.Less