The Afterlives of Byron’s ‘The Isles of Greece’ in the Victorian Press

Abstract

In the nineteenth-century British press, ‘The Isles of Greece, the Isles of Greece’, as the Brighton Gazette put it in 1878, ‘have had their joys and beauties sung in lofty strains by the wisest, the wittiest, and the wickedest of poets’. These mostly unidentified poets remained true to the spirit of the original recitation of Byron’s ‘The Isles of Greece’ from Don Juan , where it is presented as a performance by a poet whom we may or may not trust. The poem’s double reading, its levels of irony, denial of authority, and eventual misreading, makes the persistent reappearance in various forms of the double exclamation ‘The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece!’ in the Victorian press a natural extension or afterlife of its dynamic. Political newspapers are a culturally dynamic space for unravelling the myriad of performative aspects of the poem in its various afterlives as we follow how it was transformed based on Britain’s relationship with Greece.