14/11/07 - English Literature - Byron

Byron was described by Lady Caroline Lamb as "Mad, bad and dangerous to know." He was the best-known man in all English-speaking countries. He was born into a colourful family. His mother was abandoned by his father. He went to Aberdeen Grammar School and then to Harrow and never returned to Scotland. In fact he was outspoken about his derogatory opinion of Scotland. His early life was one of disappointment and failure. He invested the family fortune in developing his estate house, only for it to be ruined by a water leak. He was not popular with university officials and never attended his work.

He began to write poetry as a student. In 1808 he wrote "Hours of Idleness" and in 1809, "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers," in which he took voice against the establishment. He began "Childe Harold" around this time. The poem could be described as a veiled autobiography or as his attempt to create a public persona. In 1810 he swam the Hellespont, a potentially fatal feat. In 1812 he wrote speeches for the House of Lords, and they give us a sense of his early radicalism. He met his future wife and had several affairs, including the national scandal of his relationship with Lady Caroline Lamb, who was already married. He had an affair with his half-sister who suspiciously gave birth the following year. He married Anne Isabella Milbanke, who had refused his first proposal of marriage but later accepted. The marriage broke up in 1816, and Byron left England forever. He had an illegitimate child by Claire Clairmont. He published "Manfred" in June of the same year. In 1818 he published "Beppo." Shelleys then arrived in Italy and stayed with Byron for nine months. In 1819 Byron had an affair with the Countess Teresa Guiccioli and wrote "Don Juan". In 1820 he rejoined politics, this time in Italy, and got involved in various scandals. After Carbonari was defeated, Byron moved to Pisa and wrote and published many works. Percy Shelley drowned in 1821. Byron got involved in a struggle between Greece and Italy, courageously rallied the Greek army, but died of a cold. "Don Juan" cantos XV and XVI were published posthumously.

"Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" has great themes tied up in the life of the author. His art seems to be a working out of himself, for the great characteristics of his poetry are: (i) authorial self-invention; (ii) the itinerant consciousness; (iii) the birth of the Byronic hero (a dramatic type later absorbed by popular culture; and (iv) (anti)Romanticism - Byron could even be described as pre-Romantic due to his earlier Classical style and Augustan mode.

(i) Authorial self-invention
Byron's texts are inseparable from him. According to Foucault, Byron should come under the type of author "creator of discourse." Byron's transformative self is discussed by Pushkin. Byron always deals with transitional versus amorphic modes. Byron celebrates his own mutability, which Wordsworth never did. Here never returns to a more grounded self, he is always moving. Performativity plays a large role in Byron's poems.

(ii) The itinerant consciousness
There is a constant form of movement in "Don Juan". And also, Childe Harold is frequently concluded to be a surrogate for Byron himself.

(iii) Birth of the Byronic hero
The 'Byronic' hero was a post-Enlightenment phenomenon. He was passionate, anti-rationalism, a cultural outsider (Byron forsook his Scottish origins), in flight from society, deeply subjective, against the dominant moral code (Byron was outside of politics and engaged in more romantic episodes) and physically appealing.

The cult of Napoleon was brought in by Byron. The cult is unlikely to have happened after Napoleon's death, if it was not for Byron. Byron travelled in a gold carriage in pretence of Napoleon and signed documents with the initials 'NB', as he revelled in the fact that he shared the same initials as the great man himself. In fact, it would not be far off the mark to say that Byron was obsessed with Napoleon.

(iv) Against Romanticism
Byron frequently insulted popular Romantic poets. He wrote lyrics for parlour songs, but they were unpopular because of their supposed pettiness and lack of profundity. There is a 'new realism' in Byron's work, a return to the mundanity of everyday life, although his life was far from mundane.

There is much orientalism in Byron, although his was not the only work imbued with oriental references, for other poets did this too, such as Coleridge in "Kubla Khan." Byron's "Court of Ali Phasha plays on the imperial fantasy of the oriental 'other'. He objectifies the oriental 'other' in a classical way, as figures in a landscape. In a sense, Byron is conventional, however, there is another side to him. He was outspoken about the acquiring of other cultures' artefacts. In a poem about the "Elgin Marbles" he is strictly anti-imperialistic. It is difficult to nail him down politically.

An early death seemed appropriate for Byron. The British knew him as a poet who published cheap editions of songs. But mass tourism owed a lot to Byron, for he was much written about, for example by Bulwer-Lytton and Charlotte Bronte. The latter was shocked by Byron and advised others not to read the works of that "evil" man. Her warning probably had the opposite effect.

In anthologies Byron has gone down the estimation compared to his contemporary poets. In "Palgrave's Golden Treasury" he comes last with only eight pages, and "Don Juan" and "Childe Harold" do not feature. By the Norton Anthology, Byron gets the most page space with 159, Wordsworth comes second with 155, Shelley 105, Keats 74, Blake is introduced for the first time with 57 pages, and Burns comes last with only 15. This shows that recently lyric poets such as Burns have not been credited as significant literary figures.