Maureen Crisp: A Tribute

Chasms in Connections: Byron Ending (in) Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage 1 and 2 Paul Elledge Two years and twelve days after departing England for his continental tour, Lord Byron landed at Sheerness on 14 July 1811 bearing the manuscript about to rocket him into international fame. 1 It tracks the months of recurrent dislocation intrinsic to a pilgrimage that enacted the chronic discontinuity of the poet’s affinitive history. Just over one-hundred lines into the new poem, a valedictory lyric by the voyaging pilgrim sings a simulated indifference to his desertion of family and friends, and foresees as his destination the desolated terrain to which in fact its author returned. 2 This essay explores Byron’s response to the devastation he in disembarking met, principally as textualized in stanzas added to Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage 1 and 2 in August and October 1811. But these supplements, partially driven by the deaths of the friends they covertly honor — John Wingfield in 1 and John Edleston in 2 — also materialize the poet’s apprehensions about reengaging a readership after his recklessly undiscriminating English Bards and Scotch Reviewers had jarred and piqued the British literary establishment in 1809. The stanzas in question encrypt anxieties aroused by gaps in Byron’s personal landscape and inflamed by the imminence of a gap between poet and manuscript — by the rift created with his abandonment of the Childe to an uncertain audience. My subject, broadly, is Byron ending: suffering, evading, disguising, denying, performing, and surviving terminations; ending relationships, poems, relationships with poems and their audiences; designing structures to accommodate and facilitate the dissociative imperative that determines so much of his verse as it disabled so many of his connections. More particularly, I look at the complementary coincidence of fateful human with necessary authorial separation in Byron’s elaborated conclusions to his cantos, whereby he converts a psychic deficiency into a textual strength that ministers to the anxieties it inscribes. Among these, ruptures not of his making actuate a Pilgrimage discourse that nevertheless exploits them in the vexatious task of textual termination. [End Page 121] I Two testimonial stanzas (1.91–92) precede the deceptively conventional parting address to Byron’s readership that formally concludes canto 1 of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. 3 The collective circumstances inspiring them realized, with horribly concentrated impact, the vision of decimation ending Harold’s “Good Night” song (CH, 1.118197), for they resonate with the grief that staggered Byron as he learned, in Jobean succession, of the deaths of five intimates between July and October 1811, while preparing his new poem for the press. Mrs. Byron died on 1 August at Newstead Abbey, before reunion with her son who had lingered in London from mid-July. News of the deaths of two schoolmates, Hargreaves Hanson, second son of Byron’s solicitor, at 23, and John Wingfield, at 20, “among my juniors and favourites [at Harrow], whom I spoilt by indulgences” (M, 21), reached Byron in late July. Charles Skinner Matthews, the poet’s high-spirited Cambridge companion, strangled among underwater weeds in the River Cam on 3 August. And by 10 October, Byron knew that his beloved Cambridge chorister John Edleston was dead of consumption. On 7 August he wrote in (an uncannily proleptic Frankensteinian) anguish to Scrope Berdmore Davis: Some curse hangs over me and mine. My mother lies a corpse in this house: one of my best friends is drowned in a ditch. What can I say, or think, or do? My dear Scrope, if you can spare a moment, do come down to me, I want a friend. Matthews’s last letter was written on Friday, — on Saturday he was not.... Come to me, Scrope, I am almost desolate — left almost alone in the world.” 4 And on the 10th to John Cam Hobhouse: My dwelling, you already know, is the House of Mourning, & I am really so much bewildered with the different shocks I have sustained, that I can hardly reduce myself to reason by the most frivolous occupations. My poor J. Wingfield, my Mother, & and your best friend, (surely not the worst of mine) C [harles] S [kinner] M [atthews] have disappeared in one little month...

For over forty years now, Jerome McGann has been shaping the ways we see Lord Byron, his writings, his Romantic contexts and his legacy. Moreover, McGann's engagements with Byron have taken an extraordinarily wide range of forms, including editorial, critical, theoretical, biographical, historical and creative acts, many of which have not only transformed the study of Byron but continue to provide the terms for larger conversations: about Romanticism, about textual theory and practice, about literary history and about poetics and performance. To the extensive record of printed material that these engagements have produced, we need to add McGann's generous influence as a teacher and as a leader in the scholarly community, both roles in which he continues to profess Byron's clear-eyed, lucid, critical spirit while encouraging younger scholars and cultivating a wide-ranging discussion about the poet and his work. It should also be remembered that, all along, McGann has made major scholarly contributions on a number of non-Byronic subjects, including Romanticism and other Romantic-period authors, modern and contemporary poetry, the Pre-Raphaelites, literary and editorial theory and digital scholarship. Such a career might well abash anyone charged with summarising even a portion, especially in brief compass. The following, then, is not definitive, but only an attempt at a chronological overview of McGann's ongoing contributions to Byron Studies. 1966-1980 What might be considered the first phase of McGann's work on Byron begins with his Yale dissertation, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and the Poetics of Self-Expression (1966), and ends with the appearance of the first volume of Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works (1980). During these years, McGann published Fiery Dust: Byron's Poetic Development (1969) and Don Juan in Context (1976), books that established him as a leading new voice in Byron Studies, even as they demonstrated his own evolving theoretical position. Fiery Dust offers a wide-ranging set of readings of Byron's poetry, with a particular emphasis on matters textual, historical and biographical. The Don Juan book is a kind of sequel, though with a more focused attention on form and style. A number of McGann's articles in The Byron Journal and Keats Shelley Memorial Bulletin during this period attest to his interest in textual and editorial matters as he began work on the Complete Poetical Works, and both Byron books reveal his developing historicist sympathies as a critic. One also finds in a very early essay on 'the Dandy' some of the fundamental insights regarding Byronism and Romanticism that would structure McGann's critical attitude in the decades to come. It was during these early years, when he taught at the University of Chicago, that McGann helped form the experimental drama group Cain's Company, which staged difficult plays, including Byron's Cain, in the late 1960s. He also became one of the founding directors of the Byron Society of America in the early 1970s. Most importantly, he began editing the complete works of Byron, a process that caused him to re-think the nature of texts, literary production and reception, and Byron's place in the Romantic tradition. Over the next decades, the effects of this editorial project, and this reconceptualisation, would influence the study of Byron in profound ways. Books 1. Fiery Dust: Byron's Poetic Development (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969) 2. Don Juan in Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press; London: John Murray, 1976) 3. Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, Vol. I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980) Articles 1. 'Childe Harold's Pilgrimage I-II: A Collation and Analysis', Keats Shelley Memorial Bulletin (1966), pp. 37-54 2. 'The Composition, Revision, and Meaning of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage III', Bulletin of the New York Public Library (September 1967), pp. 415-30 3. …

Venice's 'evident decay' might repulse others, but Byron said he had been 'familiar with ruins too long to dislike desolation'.1 The Italian city's crumbling architecture, mildewed walls and dangerous passageways harmonised not only with recollections of his ancestral Newstead Abbey, but with the 'Orient' that had captivated and liberated him on his journey with his friend John Cam Hobhouse in 1810-11. That trip had inspired Childe Harold's Pilgrimage I and II, The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair, Lara, Parisina and The Siege of Corinth. In a letter to Thomas Moore of 17 November 1816, Byron presents Venice, the current source of his inspiration, as an amalgam: a paradisal 'greenest island' that is also a decadent city,2 only one step in thought away from the lawless Eastern regions that had provided scope for the indulgence of his homosexual passions. Thus, Byron consciously locates the keenest pangs of the ardour that fed his imagination in what is decadent, desolate, buried and ruined. As Dame Rose Macaulay once observed, there is 'no end to the disinterment of ruined antiquity in Asia Minor, for more, no doubt, is under the ground than above it'.3 And more is under the psyche than can be observed on its surface, for, as many have noted, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage III and IV touch (paradoxically?) several times upon Wordsworthian nature, as if it might after all prove important as a creative source.4 It is a strange and interesting moment in Byron's career, and one in which Wordsworth certainly played a part, but, ultimately, only a minor one. Byron generally focused on Wordsworth as an object of satire, but he also learned from the older poet. In the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, one finds the occasional Wordsworthian note: 'Oh! there is sweetness in the mountain air, / And life, that bloated ease can never hope to share' (CHP I, 30). Alan Rawes has argued that such borrowing is superficial compared to the deeper engagement Byron had with Wordsworthian 'procedures' and 'the Greater Romantic Lyric'.5 Overt Wordsworthian touches in Childe Harold I and II do indeed seem more like grace-notes lost in a thundering fugue of war, bloodshed and political and amorous treachery. Byron's engagement with Wordsworthian ideas about nature seems transient and superficial. Wherever he travels, from Portugal to Spain or Greece, what Byron looks for and finds is abundant historical evidence that 'keen Vengeance' has been at work (CHP I, 87). He explores battlefields from Talavera to Marathon. The Parthenon's 'broken arch, its ruined wall, / Its chambers desolate, and portals foul' make an apt counterpart to a skull, that 'dome of Thought' and 'palace of the Soul' which seems to peer at him 'through each lack-lustre, eyeless hole' (CHP II, 6). Admittedly, in his 1812 incarnation, Harold temporarily escapes 'to hold / Converse with Nature's charms, and view her stores unroll'd' (CHP II, 25), and later pauses to remark that 'Dear Nature is the kindest mother still' (CHP II, 37). At such moments, as Rawes notes, it seems Byron is truly 'toying with, or meditating upon, an idea of escaping into transcendent communion with nature that is very close to the Wordsworth paradigm'.6 But if Nature is the 'kindest mother', Harold still admits that he always 'lov'd her best in wrath' (CHP II, 37). Harold also takes pleasure in the barbarity of Albanian music 'half s[u]ng, half scream'd' (CHP II, 72) and other ironic or macabre moments connoting life's ephemerality. The first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage end with the theme of time, and the loss of his friends and mother: 'Roll on vain days! full reckless may ye flow / Since time hath reft whate'er my soul enjoy'd, / And with the ills of Eld mine earlier years alloy'd' (CHP II, 98).7 Newer ills sped Byron across the channel a short four years later, and within days of his departure in April 1816 he began to write the continuation of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. …

The mandate of the 'Collecting Byron' conference was double: to assemble Byron scholar-collectors and to celebrate the Byron Society of America's collection of Byroniana, books and ephemera now housed at the Drew University Library. In her accomplished introduction to the conference pamphlet, Marsha Manns, Co-Founder and Chair of the Byron Society of America, gives the history of the Byron collection at Drew and anecdotes regarding several of the donors, including Jackie Palmer and Michael Rees, now Brother Teilo. The conference was also the occasion of the ninth Leslie A. Marchand Memorial Lecture, given by Alice Levine (Hofstra). Twenty-two Byron scholars attended the conference, including the redoubtable Jack Gumpert Wasserman, who described his Byron Collection and his international adventures as a collector, as well as David McClay, Senior Curator of the John Murray Archive, National Library of Scotland, who offered many valuable insights into the history of this, the most important collection of Byron documents and MSS.Alice Levine's lecture suited the conference and invoked the legacy of Leslie A. Marchand most admirably. Since the publication of her critical edition of Byron's Poetry and Prose (Norton, 2010), Professor Levine has had to answer many times the question, 'Why didn't you include [insert your missing favourite here]?' Levine's lecture was a thoughtful answer to this question which she supplemented with a spreadsheet outlining which 'favourites' did make it into eight of the most recognised editions beginning with Swinburne's Moxon edition (1866) and including Auden's (NAL, 1966), McGann's (OUP, 2000) and her own. To the surprise of many in the audience, the most anthologised poem by Byron is not 'She Walks in Beauty' but rather 'On this Day I Complete my Thirty-Sixth Year'. Levine gave many insights into the 'saga' of selecting the poems for her edition, a process which consumed two years of the nine-year project; and the second-guessing of her selections continues to haunt her. She admires Auden's edition because of his relish for Byron's satire and because he includes many of the letters. Following Auden's example, Levine reprinted 82 letters and several journal entries, many of which include shorter poems. An anecdote that Levine recounted is especially telling. She recalled seeing a framed version of Byron's 'Lines Inscribed upon a Cup Formed from a Skull' in a friend's apartment. The fact that she and her friend shared an affection for the poem, albeit unknowingly, brought a fresh appreciation for the lines. One can't help but wonder how strongly and thoroughly the sharing of Byron's work informs this fine edition. The hardest choice of all was cutting Don Juan because digression is all; and without the narrative context for a 'hinge', the artifice of Byron's digressive art loses its copiousness and power.I was most struck by the strong representation of young Byron scholars from the USA and Canada. In his paper 'Let us look at them as they are: Lord Byron and Modern Greek Print Culture', Alexander Grammatikos (Carleton) gave a splendid analysis of Byron's changing attitudes to the Greece of the first Mediterranean Tour as exemplified in the notes appended to Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Cantos I and II. Grammatikos is uniquely qualified to shed light on Byron's understanding of the Romaic language and print culture that Byron discovered at the end of 1809. He made the point that Byron wanted to look at the contemporary Greek writers 'as they are ' rather than as automatically subordinated to Classical Greek culture. Isaac Cowell (Rutgers) in his 'Byron as Collector of Failures and Improbabilities: Don Juan and the Problem of Hope', focused on Byron's use of'oppositional irony' whereby an apparent moment of frustration or 'deadweight' can produce a flicker of hope. Cowell used Don Juan, VIII, 96 and the dynamism of the shared 'dilated glance' between Juan and Leila to make his point. Byron often confronts the reader with an apparent paradox and then dares the reader to consider it. …

The Tenth International Student Byron Conference, held from 22-27 May 2015 in Messolonghi, Greece, appropriately acknowledged tenth anniversary of such an ambitious and successful conference by choosing broad theme 'Byron and Mediterranean'. As in past, conference-which as always was flawlessly organised and managed by President of Messolonghi Byron Society. Mrs. Rosa Florou- drew participants from around world for nearly a week of insightful scholarship regarding Byron's life and works, travel spanning region, and intellectual companionship. This year's participants were undergraduate and graduate students, professors and local enthusiasts. They traveled from such places as United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Taiwan, Lebanon, and Greece.Because conference officially began with registration at four o'clock on 22 May, that first Friday was an opportunity for many participants to explore parts of Athens (where most travellers first arrived from their home countries), beautiful coastline and mountains that separate Athens and Messolonghi and that include such famous sites as Corinth Canal, or charming town of Messolonghi itself. Once everyone arrived and checked in at Theoxenia Hotel, participants boarded a coach for Byron House containing administrative office of Messolonghi Byron Society and library of Byron Research Center. There they were greeted by delicious homemade desserts and coffee and had an opportunity to mingle before being welcomed by conference directors Mrs. Rosa Florou, Professor Peter Graham, Director of International Relations for Messolonghi Byron center, and Joint President of International Association of Byron Societies, Professor Naji Oueijan. After refreshments, group was treated to a tour of a variety of significant sites in Messolonghi, including Cathedral of Agios Spyridon, which Byron visited during his time living in 'sacred city', and Gallery of Christos and Sophia Moschandreou to see an exhibition of modern paintings relating to Byron and to local area. Both were beautiful experiences that built nicely towards final sightseeing opportunity at Municipal Museum of History and Art Municipal Gallery, which provided useful historical background information of area. After perusing art in Municipal Gallery, participants were welcomed by Mayor of Messolonghi, Mr. Nikos Karapanos, who gave a warm and passionate speech in Greek, translated into English by several lively impromptu translators. The evening concluded with a welcoming dinner at nearby Archontiko restaurant, followed by (for many of those jet lagged) an early bedtime or else (for those more rested) a night of dancing and socialising in heart of Messolonghi.The academic portion of conference began on Saturday 23 May, at Regional building. There, Rosa Florou, Peter Graham, Jonathan Gross, Naji Oueijan, and Peter Myrian greeted participants but also, more significantly, reflected on life and scholarship of recently deceased English Byron scholar Peter Cochran. Following a moment of silence, first session, chaired by Peter Myrian, began. The first paper, given by Stephen Minta (York), revisited Stephen Cheeke's Byron and Place: History, Translation, and Nostalgia and paid particular attention to Byron's complicated relationship with Greece of past and of his present day using Childe Harold's Pilgrimage as a foundation for his argument. Perhaps even more interestingly, Minta addressed questions regarding 'authenticity of traveller's engagement with what Byron calls the truth of history [...] and of place.' Elli Karampela (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) gave next paper, which made use of Benedict Anderson's theoretical framework 'imagined communities' to examine Byron's own complex relationship with place of England versus place of Greece. …

Leslie A. Marchand once remarked that ‘the happiest thing for the spread of Byron’s reputation has been the Byron Society’. This essay draws upon a host of unpublished materials by Byron’s biographer and editor, including his Memoirs which were written late in his long life. The Memoirs, together with articles, papers, and letters, demonstrate Marchand’s staunch belief that the Byron Society should take the leading role in creating and sustaining interest in the poet well into the twenty-first century. Examined collectively, the Marchand papers provide insight into the Byron Society’s history, including the exchange of ideas fostered by the International Byron Society, particularly during the formative years.

In 1967, Robert Gleckner devoted two chapters in his still impressive Byron and the Ruins of Paradise to Childe Harold's Pilgrimage I-II. This was a bold thing to do. Byron's poetry at that time, apart from what were pigeonholed as 'the satires' (Beppo, Don Juan and The Vision of Judgement), was almost universally patronised. Andrew Rutherford, an intelligent man and one of the time's foremost Byronists, could take for granted in a 1988 article in The Byron Journal that 'so much of Byron's poetry is downright bad or mediocre'.1 Gleckner noted that it 'is not only fashionable but critically correct to dismiss the first two cantos [of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage] almost as if they never existed'.2In 2012 in London, a symposium was held mainly on 'Byron in 1812' to commemorate the bicentenary of the poem's publication. Some very distinguished Byron critics (and these are now sufficiently numerous to be no longer a protected species) took Childe Harold's Pilgrimage I-II very seriously indeed. Times have changed. Another anniversary in 2012 might help to explain this change. Forty years ago, The Byron Journal was founded by Elma Dangerfield and Dennis Walwin Jones. It was initiated in 1972 but the first issue was on Byron's birthday, 22 January 1973. Almost unbelievably, 22 January was to be the date of Elma Dangerfield's death in 2006.It would be wrong to over-estimate the rise in Byron's reputation over this period, he is still barely taught in schools and under-taught in universities. The public at large remain convinced that Lord Byron is a Rupert Everett look-alike with a limp. It would smack of hubris, too, to explain his increased critical stature simply by the foundation of the journal but there has certainly been a change and The Byron Journal has certainly both mirrored and assisted this.The history of academic journals is an interesting and complicated one. I am no expert on the matter but it seems that they may be said to have originated with the Journal des Scavans (later Savants) in 1665, followed three months later by The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. The former lasted until the French Revolution. The latter was not a regular publication but became one in 1800. Their purpose was to promote the public exchange of scientific ideas. Earlier in the seventeenth century, even Robert Boyle - 'the father of modern chemistry' - was still a believer in alchemy and it may be hazarded that anyone who thought that they had discovered a method of creating gold would not rush into print with the secret. The Royal Society gradually changed all that. Science was a public domain and knowledge a public good.Interestingly, when the Journal des Savants was refounded in 1816, it changed from being primarily a scientific journal into a literary one. The early nineteenth century was the birthplace of the academic literary journal though the contributors to and main readers of the Edinburgh (1802) and Quarterly Review were not academics. Earlier famous journals in the eighteenth century, such as The Spectator and The Tatler, sometimes featured extracts from new works but they were not journals of literary criticism. The new journals in Byron's time contained articles on many subjects, had a clear political bias, but devoted much space to the criticism of new literary books and introduced a new and powerful phenomenon - 'the reviewer'. Byron's title English Bards and Scotch Reviewers relies on the new usage, where a 'reviewer' is primarily someone who writes in a literary journal.3If we jump to the literary scene a century later, we find a diverse pattern. Academic literary journals have arrived such as the American Modern Language Review (1905) and the British Review of English Studies (1925). The Times newspaper has initiated The Times Literary Supplement (1902) with anonymous scholarly reviews. On the other hand, there are many journals that carry literary reviews which are not written or intended for an academic readership. …

Byron: 'Childe Harold's Pilgrimage' and Other Romantic Poems

If only Lawrence had painted Byron, sighs the connoisseur of portraiture, all too aware that Britain's greatest portrait painter never had a go at the age's most celebrated poet. Representations of Byron - pictures, sketches, busts, medallions - proliferated during his lifetime and long after. They continue to this day. With his auburn curls, luminous, bewitching eyes, and full, voluptuous lips, Byron, in Trelawny's dramatic juxtaposition, had 'the form and features of an Apollo, with the feet and legs of a sylvan satyr'.1 From 1812, when the author of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage woke up to find himself famous, to 1816, when he exiled himself from his native land, Thomas Lawrence stood at the height of his powers. Byron's was a face to faint for, and faint the ladies did. 'That pale face is my fate,' sighed the discarded Caroline Lamb, 'toute entiere a sa proie attachee.'2 'It was one of those faces,' she wrote in her novel Glenarvon (1816), 'which, having once beheld, we never afterwards forget. It seemed as if the soul of passion had been stamped and printed upon every feature.'3 Even Claire Clairmont, discarded even more brutally than Lady Caroline, mooned over the 'wild originality' of Byron's countenance.4 Not all or even most surviving descriptions of Byron are by women. In numbers and even in enthusiasm the men have it. The Byron they describe often appears otherworldly. The first and only time Coleridge saw Byron occurred during a magical halfhour on 10 March 1816: 'he has the sweetest Countenance I ever beheld - his eyes are really Portals of the Sun'. A few days later the sun still shone. 'If you had seen Lord Byron,' Coleridge wrote, you could scarcely disbelieve him - so beautiful a countenance I scarcely ever saw - his teeth so many stationary smiles - his eyes the open portals of the sun - things of light, and for light - and his forehead so ample, and yet so flexible, passing from marble smoothness into a hundred wreathes and lines and dimples correspondent to the feelings and sentiments he is uttering.5 'A brother poet,' Scott recalled in 1816, compared Byron's features 'to the sculpture of a beautiful alabaster vase, only seen to perfection when lighted up from within.' Most likely the 'brother poet' was Coleridge.6 The available engravings 'give one no impression of him,' thought Scott; 'the lustre is there, ... but is not lighted up. Byron's countenance is a thing to dream of.'7 For Scott, Byron's extraordinary personal beauty lay as much in the observer's mind and imagination as in reality. 'Lord Byron's head,' wrote his son-in law John Gibson Lockhart, 'is, without doubt, the finest in our time - I think it better, on the whole, than either Napoleon's, or Goethe's, or Canova's, or Wordsworth's.'8 Testimony from sources so varied - several not otherwise friendly to Byron - indicates the degree to which the poet's physical appearance mesmerized contemporaries. This is of course the younger Byron. In Italy after 1816, older and greyer, alternately bloated and lean, Byron nevertheless continued to dazzle onlookers. The Countess Albrizzi, a big fan, sighed in 1819, 'It would be to little purpose to dwell upon the mere beauty of a countenance in which the expression of an extraordinary mind was so conspicuous'. But like all the others she cannot resist the temptation: she details the forehead, the hair, the eyes ('expressive', 'azure'), the teeth, cheeks, neck, hands, figure.9 Trelawny, no fan at all, looking back in 1858, said that 'in external appearance Byron realised the ideal standard with which imagination adorns genius'.10 James Hamilton Browne, travelling with Byron to Cephalonia in 1823, portrays the older Byron in words that evoke the younger: The contour of his countenance was noble and striking; the forehead, particularly so, was nearly white as alabaster. His delicately formed features were cast rather in an effeminate mould, but their soft expression was in some degree relieved by the mustaches of a light chestnut, and a small tuft 'a la houssard,' which he at that time sported. …

Perhaps no great poet, in any language, has suffered more than Byron from being merely read about rather than actually read. As Bernard Beatty remarks in his introduction to this important collection of essays, the popular conception of ‘Byron’ still often approximates to ‘Rupert Everett with a limp’. Reading Byron is the product and summation of nearly sixty years devoted to studying and teaching his poetry. It argues that, far from being ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’, Byron is serious, ethically orientated and rewarding to read. The book is in three parts: Poetry – Life – Politics. Five new essays have been written especially for the first and largest section, which gives original re-readings of Byron’s major works. Beatty, who won the International Byron Societies’ Lifetime Achievement Award in 2019, has then selected three of his lively lectures on unappreciated aspects of Byron the man, and three pithy essays on Byron as a complex, if not systematic, political thinker. While Beatty does not question the pre-eminent status of the ‘bright’ Don Juan, devoting a chapter to an unconventional reading of its final cantos, he argues powerfully that nineteenth-century readers, who responded on an unprecedented scale to the forceful poetic structures of the ‘dark’ Byron in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, The Tales, Manfred, and Cain, were right to do so. Reading Byron, introduced by the great American scholar Jerome McGann, is itself essential reading for any student or lover of Romantic poetry.

The purpose of this paper is to attend to the preface as an important element in understanding the symbiotic relationship between author and text, especially when a male author assumes the female power of procreation. In the prefaces to Don Quixote Part I and II and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Cervantes and Lord Byron, respectively, identify their main heroes as their 'child of the imagination/brain '. Nevertheless, in many instances we encounter moments of anxiety manifested in a dialectic of engagement and disengagement, owning and disowning, of denying and defending theirfictional personages. To Cervantes, Don Quixote is "child of his brain", the son, and yet hes also the stepson, who eventually ends up no more than a brave knight; to Byron, as well, Childe Harold was initially called Childe Burun, but later on is referred to as just a "fictitious character" from whom Byron tried to disengage throughout the poem. This equivocal and dialectical discourse ofembracement and abandonment could be better understood by extending the birthing metaphor to encompass postpartum anxiety. In the prefaces, both Cervantes and Byron Platonic male spiritual pregnancy is combined with the female physical and psychological symptoms of giving birth and its qftermath. Thus, the preface becomes a birth certificate not only legitimizing the hero, but also problematizing the parental relationship between father/author and son/text or hem, for it involves more than the ontological history Of the hem or the text.

The 29th International Byron Conference was held at University of Liverpool between 19th and 24th of August 2003. It opened with a welcome session in main lecture theatre of 1830s building of Liverpool Medical Institute. This is a very fine, wood-panelled and balconied theatre-very like, I imagine, kind of lecture theatre in which Coleridge and Hazlitt would have given their lectures. The conference was officially got under way with addresses by Professor Philip Davis (Head of English at Liverpool), Professor Drummond Bone (Liverpool's Vice- Chancellor) and Mr Ron Gould (Lord Mayor of Liverpool). The conference theme was 'Byron and Good Life', with a minor theme of 'Byron and Sea'. Vincent Newey (Leicester) got discussion of 'Byron and Good Life' off to an excellent start with 'Good Life, Bad Life: Byron, Dickens and Adventure of Georg Simmel'. Uncovering numerous hidden quotations from and references to Byron across Dickens's work, Newey argued that Dickens's critique of English aristocracy was mainly based on his reading of Norman Abbey cantos of Don Juan. Acknowledging a fundamental difference between Byronic celebration of 'the classical body' in Childe Harold IV and rather more Dickensian province of 'the grotesque body', Newey nevertheless uncovered traces of former in account of Steerforth's death in David Copperfield, suggesting that death of Steerforth in some ways depicts nineteenth-century death of Byronism. The first panel of conference was opened by Corinna Russell (Cambridge). Her paper, 'Reading the moral of all human tales: Childe Harold IV and Wreck of Good Life', carefully distinguished between ethical and moral and argued that Byron's understanding of morality was not primarily to do with interior intents but with public realm of actions. Shobhana Bhattacharji (Delhi) spoke on complexities involved in reading Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. She argued that meaning of poem is bound up with its gaps and with silences, and that reader picks up more of permanent paradoxes of poem than they can wholly explain. This, she demonstrated, is part of difficulty of Childe Harold. After a five minute mid-session break (an innovation much appreciated by delegates), Paul M. Curtis (Moncton-and organiser of next year's International Conference, on 'Byron and Sublime', to be held at his university) and Michael O'Neill (Durham) gave their papers. Curtis's 'Prophecy and Prophetic in Byron's Poetry and Drama' was concerned with Byron's relationship with prophetic tradition and prophetic habits of mind. Michael O'Neill's paper, 'A Stalking Oracle: Beppo and Good' made an interesting distinction between 'attention' and 'curiosity', then contrasted 'attention' with what O'Neill argued is pure 'curiosity' of Beppo-a curiosity through which selfconsciousness is lost and world is simply relished. In afternoon we moved to University's Senate Room for another four-paper session. First we heard Tony Howe (Cambridge) speak on 'Byron's The Island and Choice of Good Lives' and David Roessel, winner of Elma Dangerfield Prize for In Byron's Shadow, on 'Seeking a Soldier's Grave: Byron and a Good Death'. Tony Howe bravely declared that ending of The Island is flawed. David Roessel showed how Tennessee Williams made a play out of image of Byron's heroic death in Greece without, it seems, knowing anything about poet at all. After break, Gavin Hopps (Aachen) gave a fine paper on what he called Byron's 'porousness' that distinguished between Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, in which Byron constantly moves outwards, towards and into space and art works, and Don Juan, where Byron does opposite and brings a whole metaphysical world into Norman Abbey and Aurora Raby. Hopps's distinctive terminology-the 'porous', 'penetrable' and 'leaky' were some of his terms-echoed through rest of conference. …

Most readers of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage concentrate on the poem but the full effect of Byron's popular work is also based on notes and other ‘extraneous’ materials. In particular, the second canto and Byron's views on the contemporary Greece which he discovered on his travels and which sometimes challenged received assumptions depends not only on its poetic core but also on a complement of extra poems, a range of annotation including a number of substantial essays, angry responses to Elgin and Lusieri and appraising accounts of Turks and Albanians, a detailed appendix on Romaic (or vernacular modern Greek), and a facsimile of a letter to Byron in Romaic. The philhellenism which is rightly attributed to Byron and to Childe Harold's Pilgrimage is the product both of a poem which is predominantly nostalgic and looks yearningly to a heroic past and also of notes and prose essays demonstrating a passionate identification with victimised Greek contemporaries, who are associated with other ‘enslaved’ or ‘fall...

51 On 19 September 1809, having been away from England for a few months, during which he travelled to Portugal, Spain, and Malta, the twenty-one year-old George Gordon Byron sailed for Greece. His tour of the famous classical sites included a short excursion into Tepelene, Albania, where he was ‘excellently treated by the Chief Ali Pasha’1 and where he found the inspiration for the central section (stanzas 36–72) of the second canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. The beginning and the end of the canto, mirroring Byron’s own travelling schedule, focus on Greece. While the poet’s premature death at Missolonghi secured him a place among the champions of philhellenism, his fascination with Turkey, the ruling force in the Balkan peninsula of the time, has brought this traditional conception of Byron as a fi ghter for Greek freedom into question.2 At the same time, Byron’s ‘Eastern’ poetry has earned him a place in Edward Said’s compilation of authors who made ‘a signifi cant contribution to building the Orientalist discourse’,3 a view that has also come under criticism and one which requires further scrutiny. Harold’s adventure in Albania can be read as ‘orientalising’ in as far as it functions to perpetuate such conventional binary opposites as West and East, progress and stasis, experience and innocence, and so forth, but the stanzas on neighbouring Greece, which frame the experience at Ali Pasha’s court in the second canto, muddle the simple East/West opposition. Relying on theoretical models that emerged in response to Said’s seminal study Orientalism, such as Maria Todorova’s concept of ‘Balkanism’ and David Cannadine’s ‘Ornamentalism’, this essay seeks to off er a more nuanced reading of Byron’s encounter with the Ottoman-ruled Balkans. The Self/Other distinction, typical of travel narratives and foundational to the idea of Orientalism, will be re-examined and complicated in light of the contrast that is employed in Byron’s works between Greece as the cradle of Western civilization in decline and Albania as a novel site of discovery. While Said’s groundbreaking work has been criticized for portraying the West too monolithically and for defi ning it too exclusively in terms

This essay explores Byron’s poetry of departure in the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage . It examines these cantos’ treatment of history and genre, their use of rhyme and phrasal repetition, their negotiation of the relationship between narrator and character, and their themes of elegy and endurance. It argues that much which is dramatic and affecting in the opening cantos derives from an exilic rhetoric that is self-subverting and self-correcting.