31st International Byron Conference, University College, Dublin: 'The Greenest Isle of my Imagination'

Abstract

Dublin was an excellent place to have an international Byron conference, given Byron's strong feelings about the sufferings of Ireland, the fact that one of his best friends was an Irishman and given his admiration for so many Irishmen such as Sheridan and Curran. Many others must have thought so too, for this, taking place from 1 to 6 August 2005, was one of the largest Byron Conferences to be held with a very strong set of papers and an attendance of over 100. The Academic sessions were held by courtesy of University College, Dublin and the Conference centre was in the Montrose Hotel immediately opposite the campus. The hotel staff were outstandingly cooperative and helpful. And it was in the hotel that, immediately after registration, the first evening was marked by the showing of a television film about Thomas Moore, lent by the Irish Byron Society. It was a sequence of Moore songs, strung together with minimal narrative links and filmed against beautiful backgrounds. The Society's chair, Maureen Charlton, prefaced the film with a charming poem of welcome. The only fly in the ointment was that, as appeared later, it was the wrong film! The proper film (focusing on the relation between Moore and Byron) was shown later in the week and was even better. Tuesday started, after a genial and eloquent welcome from the UK Ambassador and the Vice-Principal of UCD, with Michael O'Neill giving the plenary paper, on Matthew Arnold's reaction to Byron. This was an original and highly enjoyable talk, densely illustrated and beautifully articulated, which revisited some of the old chestnuts of Byron criticism ('Byron bore through Europe [...] the pageant of his bleeding heart') in a fresh way, and argued convincingly that we should attend as much to what poets say about other poets as to academic criticism. Then there was a parallel session in which Peter Cochran and two colleagues were pitched against Malcolm Kelsall, on 'Byron and the Milesian Chief', David Herbert and Katherine Kernberger: his paper was about Annabella's good works in later life, hers about Glenarvon. Peter Cochran began the other session with a paper on the Marquis of Sligo, and he was followed by Edward Burns, who spoke very interestingly about Sheridan and Moore. Jim Haughey, from Ulster, then spoke in detail about Irish politics and Byron's attitude towards them. Jeffery Vail had lost his luggage and his paper courtesy of Aer Lingus, and was replaced by Tony Tyler, who spoke on blood as a Byronic image. Shobhana Battacharji then gave a very interesting analysis of Byron's letters from Venice trying to locate ways in which we could find structural allusions in them (a version of this paper appears in this journal), and Paul Douglass gave a vivid paper on decomposition in Childe Harold IV in which, unfashionably, he championed Byron's pessimism. The day ended with Graham Caie from Glasgow giving an authoritative talk on the Murray Archive's move to Edinburgh, where it will be ready for use, he promised, by September 2006. The talk concentrated on the Byron archive but gave a helpful account of the whole collection and cleared up the obscurity surrounding the acquisition. A version of it will appear in a later edition of this journal. That night we saw The Importance of Being Earnest at the Abbey Theatre. It was in effect a drag show, with a prologue showing Wilde going to seed in Paris. His presence then haunted the production and epilogue. I rather dreaded the whole thing but, in the event, it worked extremely well both as a performance of the play in its own right and as a piece of theatrical invention. The actor who played Cecily was outstanding; he who was Gwendolen gave, some thought, a good impression of the late Princess Diana. The opening day of the conference was set up to focus on the 'Greenest Isle' primarily as Venice and Ireland. Thereafter papers opened up the topic in much more general ways. So, to highlight this, Wednesday opened with a reading of the last sections of The Prisoner of Chillon (which include, of course, the lines on 'A small green isle'), followed by a spontaneous public discussion of it by Yoshie Kimura, Gavin Hopps, Jonathon Shears and Carl Thompson, which in turn developed into a discussion to which a large number of delegates contributed. …