"Vigour to sustain": The Experience of Imprisonment and Stoic Principles in Lord Byron's The Lament of Tasso

Abstract

Tasso as an exemplary Stoic figure begins in his motivations. Whereas the biblical figures typically devote themselves entirely to God, Tasso concentrates on his own mental state, and the ways by which he does so leads straight to Byron's interest in Stoicism that surfaces in his letters, journals, and reading lists, composed since adolescence. This interest led Byron to adopt some of their key notions about, Thomas Rolleston writes, one's "highest spiritual faculty and deepest sense of reason" by which a suffering protagonist is able to maintain dignity (252). In one of his accounts composing "Detached Thoughts," penned between 15 October 1821 and 18 May 1822, Byron is, Rolleston continues, interested in the "Stoic vision" of "the supremacy of the human soul over the human body" (23) referenced in both Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius (BLJ 9: 45). In the same journal, Byron reveals a firm belief in the perpetual nature of internal human working: "Of the immortality of the Soul—it appears to me that there can be little doubt—if we attend for a moment to the action of Mind.—It is in perpetual activity" (BLJ 9: 45). Byron perceives an intimate relationship between the constant "action" of the human mind and insoluble burdens of physical ordeals when understanding the two thinkers: "the Stoics Epictetus & Marcus Aurelius call the present state 'a Soul which drags a Carcase'—a heavy chain to be sure, but all chains being material may be shaken off … that the Mind is eternal—seems as possible as that the body is not so" (45).