Lord Byron, George Gordon
Prepared by Skylar Hamilton Burris
"There are but two
sentiments to which I am constant:
a strong love of liberty, and a detestation of cant." - Lord Byron
Expanded Timeline:
1788 Born in London
1791 Father dies in France
1798 Becomes 6th Baron of Rochdale after William, Lord Byron
dies
1805 Enters Trinity College, Cambridge
1807 Leaves Cambridge
1809 Takes his seat at The House of Lords
Leaves London
with Hobhouse on his first "Pilgrimage"
English Bards & Scotch Reviewers
1810 Swims the Hellespont with Lt. Ekenhead and writes
"Written After Swimming From Sestos to Abydos"
1811 Returns from England. His mother dies. Hints
from Horace.
1812 Affair with Caroline Lamb. Proposes marriage to Annabella Milbanke
and is refused. Affair with Lady Oxford.
Childe
Harold's Pilgramage, Cantos I and II published
1813 Affair with Lady Frances Webster. The Giaour and The
Bride of Abydos are published.
1814 Elizabeth Medora Leigh is Born (suspected daughter of Byron and his
half-sister Augusta)
1815 Byron marries Annabella Milbanke. Augusta stays with them. Augusta
Ada Byron born to Lord and Lady Byron.
Hebrew
Melodies published.
1816 Lady Byron separates from Lord Byron.
Byron joins Percy
Shelley, Mary Godwin, and Clare Clarimont in Geneva.
Parisina
published.
Childe Harold,
Canto II. "The Prisoner of Chillion."
1817 Allegra, daughter of Lord Byron and Clare Clairmont, is born. Manfred.
Childe Harold, Canto IV.
1818 Don Juan, Canto I
1819 Byron meets Teresa Guiccioli in Venice. Don Juan, Cantos
II and III.
1820 The Prophecy of Dante. Don Juan, Canto V
1821 Allegra is sent to a convent. Cain.
Sardanapalus. The Vision of Judgement.
1822 Allegra dies. Percy Shelley dies. Byron settles at Genoa. Don
Juan, Cantos VI-XI.
1823 Byron trains and subsidizes the Republican forces in Missolonghi,
Greece, in the War for Independence.
1824 "Lines on Completing My Thirty-Sixth Year." Byron dies in
Missolonghi.
Overview:
Byron was unique among Romantic poets in that he respected the neoclassical poets and sought, to some degree, to emulate them. Most Romantic poets sought to overturn the old conventions and to create a new poetry based on creativity and individualism. Byron used diverse verse structures, but he, like Pope and Dryden, wrote satires about society and other poets. In a sense, Byron straddled two worlds, as you can see in the following outline of his poetry.
Byron's Neoclassical Vein
A. English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers (begun in 1807)
1. Uses the heroic couplet. Intended to ridicule "the scribbling crew" of his day. Byron saw the poets of his day as being vastly inferior to the neoclassical poets (like Pope and Dryden) who had allied "sense and wit" with poetry.
2. Calls Southey: "the ballad-monger"
3. Says of Wordsworth:
That simple Wordsworth, framer of a lay . . .
Who, both by precept and example, shows
That prose is verse, and verse is merely prose;
Convincing all, by demonstration plain,
Poetic souls delight in prose insane;
. . . Thus, when he tells the tale of Betty Foy,
The idiot mother of "an idiot Boy";
. . . So close on each pathetic part he dwells,
And each adventure so sublimely tells,
That all who view the "idiot in his glory"
Conceive the Bard the hero of the story. (237-254)
4. Says of Coleridge:
Yet none in lofty numbers can surpass
The bard who soars to elegize an ass:
So well the subject suits his noble mind,
He brays, the Laureate of the long-eared kind. (261-264)
B. Hints from Horace (1811)
Horace’s Ara Poetica was the Bible of the neo-classicists. Byron despised Horace as a young student, but later saw his lessons as valuable and sought to enliven them with his own poetic voice.
C. The Waltz (1812)
D. Beppo (1817)
A playful satire written in ottava rima (Italian form with eight line stanzas, with 11 syllables, rhyming abababcc). Beppo is the husband of Laura, a merchant; since he is gone long at sea, she chooses a "vice-husband" to protect her. Beppo returns appearing as a Turk. In "Beppo," Byron abandoned the Popean couplet he had used in previous satires, but he used a Popean structure; that is, he satirically juxtaposed the lofty with the absurd, the pretentious with the trivial.
E. Don Juan (begun 1818)
This very long poem shows a greater freedom of form than Byron's other satires. Byron claimed it was "a satire on abuses of the present states of Society, and not an eulogy of vice."
F. The Blues (1823)
G. The Age of Bronze
H. The Vision of Judgement
A parody of Southey’s own "Vision of Judgement," which the poet laureate had written when George III died. Byron's version ridicules Southey (who had accused Byron of being a member of the "Satanic School" of poetry) and purports to tell how George III really got into heaven. (The angels and fallen angels were debating whether or not George III should be let in when Southey was brought to read his "Vision." The poem was so awful that all the angels ran away screaming, and George snuck in the gates.) Byron's "Vision" is more compact and has fewer digressions than his other satires.
Byron's Romantic Vein
A. Childe Harold’s Pilgramage
This work followed Byron's disillusionment with the French Revolution and Napoleanic Wars and dealt with the romantic dilemma: the compulsive search for an ideal that does not exist in the real world. It introduces the Byronic hero--the romantic, isolated, moody protagonist.
B. Oriental Tales and Other Tales of Adventure
1. The Giaour (1813)
2. The Bride of Abydos
3. The Corsair (Sequel: Lara) - tale of piracy and passion in the East
4. The Siege of Corinth - about an episode during the Turk’s siege and capture
of the Venetian’s citadel in 1715
5. Parisina - tale of incest taken form an account (by Gibbon) of the Marquis's
bastard son
6. The Island
C. The Prisoner of Chillion
Here is one of those rare poems in which Byron does not dramatize himself. The poem is about Frances de Bonivar, who was imprisoned for his religious beliefs during the Reformation. Byron admired him not for his religious beliefs but for standing up for liberty. The poem is written mainly in romantic couplets (iambic tetrameter) with some variation.
D. Dramas
1. Manfred
2. Cain (1821) -- See also my paper on this play.
3. Heaven and Earth (unfinished)--published 1823
4. The Deformed and Transformed (unfinished)
E. Historical Dramas
1. Marino Faliero (1820) - from an episode in Venetian history
2. The Two Foscari (1820) - from and episode in Venetian history
3. Saradanapalus (1820) - founded in the life of an Assyrian king
F. Shorter Romantic Poems (Usually direct expressions of his feelings for individuals)
1. Thyrza poems--addressed to John Edleston, a choir boy at Cambridge to whom Byron had
become passionately attached and who died in 1811
2. The poems to Augusta--"Stamzas to Augusta," "Epistle to Augusta,"
etc.
3. "Lines on Hearing That Lady Byron Was Ill" --written after he heard his wife
had rebuffed an offer of reconciliation
4. "Stanzas for Music"--written on the death of his Harrow friend the Duke of
Dorset
5. "The Dream"--traced his love for Mary Chaworth
6. "Stanzas to the Po"-- recounts his attachment to Countess Guiccioli
G. Hebrew Melodies
These poems were written at the request of Byron's friend Douglas Kinnaird, who wished him to supply lyrics for Hebrew airs adapted from the music of the synagogues. Nine of the poems are on Biblical subjects, two are love songs, five are reflective lyrics, and five are expressions of "proto-Zionism."
Form of Byron's Poems
Byron used many forms. Some examples are given below.
1. iambic tetrameter — this is a
common form in romantic verse -- "I Would I Were A Careless Child,"
"Dear Doctor, I have read your play," and "Stanzas to a Lady on Leaving
England" (this is in romantic couplets, or rhymed iambic tetrameter
couplets)
2. heroic couplets -- "Damaetas"
3. "When We Two Parted" — mainly anapestic dimeter —
lines are abbreviated, but when you read, it sound like perfect anapestic rhythm
4. "Adieu, Adieu! My Native Shore" — From Canto I of Childe Harold
— iambic tetrameter / iambic trimeter — art ballad stanza (in a
standard ballad, the odd numbered lines don’t rhyme; here they do)
5. "Oh, Snatch’d Away in Beauty’s Bloom" - Quintains
with different rhyme schemes in each, ending in a sestet
6. "The Destruction of Senecharib" - anapestic tetrameter
7. "Stanzas for Music II" — 7 feet per line, unusually long — heptameter
couplets
8. "Stanzas for Music III" - trochaic rhythm
9. "Darkness" - blank verse
10. "Beppo" — octava rima, Italian form with eight line
stanzas, with 11 syllables, rhyming abababcc
Brief Notes on Selected Poems
"I Would I Were A Careless Child" — the poem exhibits the tension between the ideal (romantic view) and the real (neoclassical view)
"When We Two Parted" — The poem is about Frances Webster, whom Byron didn’t seduce because she was a newlywed; but within a year it was reported she was having an affair with someone else, so Byron felt cheated.
"Fare thee Well" — on Byron's separation from his wife - in it he said "never / ‘Gainst thee shall my heart rebel," but a few years later he wrote a wicked parody of her in Don Juan — this is merely an example of romantic dramatization/protestation.
"Dear Doctor, I have read your play" — addressed to Byron’s friend and personal doctor, who had asked him to present his play to his publisher John Murray. The publisher rejected it and asked Byron to break the news.
Papers on this site:
Manichaeism, Skepticism, and Fideism in Lord Byron's Cain, A Mystery
Quizzes on Byron:
Byron: the Bad Boy of Poetry
A biographical quiz I contributed to FunTrivia.
Websites about Byron:
Comprehensive
Study of Lord Byron
A collection of resources dedicated to the Romantic poet and
satirist.
Suggest a website. E-mail ssburris@msn.com.