Byron's Poem Research Articles

The First Printing of a Byron Poem in America

The First Printing of a Byron Poem in America

Byron's Numerology Revisited: Don Juan

In The Byron Journal of 1994, Alan Rawes,1 picking up on James Fisher's article in 1993,2 suggests that the positioning of stanzas 49 and 50 in Cantos I and II of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage reveals a numerological pattern in Byron's poem. It seems to me that this is indeed the case but for reasons more interesting than Rawes recognised. The two stanzas come at structural midpoints in the cantos (stanza 49 of 93 and the exactly central stanza 49 of 98). Their references to 'yon long, level plain, at distance crown'd / With crags' and 'the grove that crowns yon tufted hill' relate to the tradition of central-line symbolism, which placed images of kingship and elevation, amongst other symbols that I will discuss shortly, at the centre of a literary work. Byron's intentions are made clear when, at the centre of the whole of Childe Harold (stanza 247 of 495), we read that 'by Coblentz, on a rise of gentle ground, / There is a small and simple pyramid, / Crowning the summit of the verdant mound'. The desire to place this image at the centre of Childe Harold might help to explain why Canto IV is so long. Indeed, this seems to give an answer to what may be a criticism of my argument. It will be argued that Byron wrote accretively and that this precludes the planning that is demanded by the type of centralised structure I am going to advocate. However, in this case, it appears to me that accretion deliberately creates the central emphasis or, conversely, that the desire for the central emphasis deliberately creates accretion. At the centre of Canto IV itself (stanzas 92 and 93 of 186), Byron has the 'arch of triumph' (92), God's rainbow (92) and 'things weigh'd in custom's falsest scale' (93) - images frequently found at the centre of literary structures. Another counter-argument to my own would stress Byron's digressions as working against numerical patterning. Even Fisher argues of Beppo that 'Byron's own mid-point is just another circling back to his story after yet another digression, a central position seemingly without much importance'.3 However, Beppo has a self-consciously marked centre in stanza 51 (of 99). Here, Byron wishes he 'had the art of easy writing' so that he could 'scale / Parnassus where the Muses sit'. Furthermore, if the poem 'starts' at stanza 21 (when Byron says 'But to my story'), the midpoint between this and the end of the poem is stanza 61, which has an Emperor, a God and a falling: Crush'd was Napoleon by the Northern Thor Who knock'd his army down with icy hammer. Byron also seems to use structural quarter points in Beppo. In stanza 25, we are introduced to Beppo. There is also an image of ascension: His wife would mount, at times, her highest attic For thence she could discern the ship with ease: He was a merchant trading to Aleppo, His name Giuseppe, call'd more briefly, Beppo. The three-quarter point (stanza 75) introduces two types of crown (one of which we will meet again at a key point in Don Juan): the foolscap and the coxcomb. This, of course, is also the midpoint between 'But to my tale of Laura' (stanza 50) and the end of the poem. Beppo provides clues to the structure of Don Juan, where the digressive nature of the poem allows Byron to play with central images and numerical structures in novel ways. He can be accretive, digressive and numerological. He can develop multiple, highly complex centralised structures. The plural is important because, as I hope to show, the poem is a network of overlapping structures, or, as Fisher calls those in Beppo, 'circling' structures.4 One particular aspect of this is Byron's use of a series of new, or even false, starts. This enables him to create a number of central points, even in a single canto - a technique that achieves its supreme realisation in Canto IX. He also uses central points in individual episodes and within many of the discrete periods of time depicted in Don Juan. …

Readers’ responses to sub-genre and rhyme scheme in poetry

Using a new interdisciplinary approach funded by the AHRB Research Innovations Grant Scheme we studied the process of poetry reading using the empirical methods drawn from psycholinguistics. Previous research has shown that the reading process is genre-specific, i.e. readers make a genre decision and adapt their reading strategies accordingly. For poetry reading, findings suggest that surface textual features such as rhyme and layout weigh heavily in the categorization of a text as poetry. Our study extends this research by examining finer-grained distinctions, i.e. the reading of sub-genres within poetry. In a self-paced reading task, we tested readerly responses to the two sub-genres of narrative and lyric poetry, exemplified, respectively, by Byron's poem Don Juan and by Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. We had two research questions. The first, more general, question was whether sub-generic distinctions do indeed modulate readers’ behaviour on-line. The second question concerned the role that rhyme and rhyme scheme may have in distinguishing between sub-genres, given the fact that such features have been shown to be highly reliable indicators of the poeticity of a text. We report evidence that on-line readers’ behaviour is significantly modulated by differences between poetic sub-genres. However, rhyme scheme does not appear to have a special role in modulating these differences. We discuss the implications of these findings for a theory of poetry processing and for future interdisciplinary research.

Husbands, Wives, and Lovers: Marriage and Its Discontents in Nineteenth-Century France (review)

Reviewed by: Husbands, Wives, and Lovers: Marriage and Its Discontents in Nineteenth-Century France Nicholas White Mainardi, Patricia. Husbands, Wives, and Lovers: Marriage and Its Discontents in Nineteenth-Century France. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. Pp 256. ISBN0-300-10104-X This interdisciplinary tour de force explores how the culture of Restoration society responded to the new legal context which fashioned views on marriage and the family in post-Revolutionary France. Of particular importance was the abolition of primogeniture under the Civil Code. Henceforth marital infidelity (particularly of the wifely variety), which might have followed the birth of the eldest child, would appear less of a matter for comedy (as the Ancien Régime would have it) and more as the focus of bourgeois angst. The effect of the new law was that all children (even the adulterine) could hope to inherit equal shares of the estate. Such adulterine children were deemed by law to belong to the husband, and could thus dilute the haemic coherence of the family: legitimized bastards would reduce the husband's gift to his biological progeny. Little discussed by scholars (it is worth noting as we pass) is the way in which this logic would impose a man's own illegitimate children on another man's estate and what kind of "family romance" this might imply. Mainardi's account finesses the way in which affiliations of gender were undercut by generational conflict. One of the major tensions in Mainardi's corpus turns on the satire against the unreasonable persistence of the mariage de raison in the face of the mariage d'inclination, much favoured by what we might call the filial culture of Romanticism. In the words of Raymond Jonas, "adultery could be an act in which young men instrumentalized their lovers in an intergenerational gesture of revenge," and this was represented in visual and literary culture. Chapter 3 examines an impressively reproduced range of lithographic images of young men stealing old men's wives. Chapter 4 explores the tensions on stage between the ambiguous Delavigne, the conservative Scribe and the liberal Ducange, which explode in the bataille d'Hernani where Hugo confronts the "euphoric gerontocracy" of the Restoration. Chapter 5, perhaps the least robust in this panoply, surveys some of the fiction of the comtesse de Genlis, Balzac, Stendhal and Sand. Chapter 6 decrypts painterly versions by Géricault, Delacroix, Vernet and Boulanger of Byron's poem about Mazeppa, a member of the Ukranian gentry in the service of Poland in the 17th century, who was caught in an affair with the wife of a Polish official. For his punishment, he was stripped and tied backwards (spine to spine) to a horse. In spite of the sub-title's reference to Freud (in translation) and the invoking of Lynn Hunt's work on the Revolution, Mainardi resists the Oedipal language of history as psychodrama, with theoretical positions left implicit in this study. All in all, this will prove to be a vital book for those scholars interested in debates on and representations of marriage and the family in Restoration France. Although the [End Page 166] churlish might complain that the book's title claims more than it delivers, the range of cultural objects highlighted in its six core chapters is impressive. In spite of the historical scope of its title, Mainardi's study is generous enough not to leave the intimidated reader feeling that 'tout est dit.' Instead, her local study of the Restoration will inspire researchers in the wider field to explore the terra incognita that remains. The title might also invite the reader to expect a "straight" (or at least social) history of marriage in 19th century France. Instead, what we find is a cultural history of the high and low representations which turn on the question of marriage in the wake of the Revolution and Napoleon. This has displeased the reviewer of the TLS, Graham Robb. The most influential modern-day English-language biographer of 19th century France has complained that "the book turns out to be a study of adultery (the idea rather than the practice) in Restoration France as it was reflected in the...

The Curse of the Ephesians: A Long Footnote to Byron

In 'The Curse of Minerva', Byron has the goddess place a curse on Lord Elgin for his theft of the famous marbles from her Temple in Athens, the Parthenon: Oh, loathed in life nor pardon'd in the dust, May hate pursue his sacrilegious lust! Linked with the fool that fired the Ephesian dome, Shall vengeance follow far beyond the tomb, And Eratostratus and Elgin shine In many a branding page and burning line; Alike reserved for aye to stand accursed, Perchance the second blacker than the first. (199-206) The question is: Who was Eratostratus? Far from shining in many a branding page and burning line, Eratostratus does not appear in any record whatsoever, ancient or modern, other than Byron's poem. Byron is apparently misremembering another name: Herostratus, the man who set fire to the great Temple of Diana (or Artemis) at Ephesus in 356 BC. The standard editions of Byron set the name straight with no further comment. But what made him get the name wrong? Was it only a desire to alliterate it with 'Elgin' along with an aristocratic nonchalance about classical scholarship? Or did he know what he was doing? After turning over the ancient sources about Herostratus, I have felt a pricking in my thumbs: something else may have been at work on Byron, something ancient and uncanny. For what is odd about his mistake is that the original vengeance that was meant to follow Herostratus beyond the tomb was precisely never to shine in the annals, however blackly, but to be erased from all remembrance forever. Byron seems to have forgotten that, too, if he ever knew it. By repeating the name, Byron is effectively breaking ranks with an ancient punishment, a damnatio memoriae of unusual severity. It is also true, however, that by repeating the name half wrongly he is half carrying out the vengeance. One could even say that by substituting a near-name for the true one Byron has repaired the breach in the prohibition around the true one in the best possible way. How better to erase a name than circulate one somewhat like it? The many readers of Byron, at least, will have a rival name running interference in their minds with the original, if they know the original at all, and some readers will confuse it further with Eratosthenes and thus obliterate the original completely. And that was the goal of the Ephesian authorities. As far as it can be reconstructed from the slender survivals of ancient texts, here is what happened in Ephesus. The great Temple of Diana, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, so magnificent that it had been spared by Xerxes when he destroyed nearly all the other temples in Asia, was set afire by an Ephesian named Herostratus in 356 BC. Under torture by the authorities, Herostratus confessed that his motive was to spread his name throughout the world. As his most fitting punishment the Ephesians decreed 'uti nomen eius, qui templum Dianae Ephesi incenderat, ne quis ullo in tempore nominaret', as Aulus Gellius put it five centuries later in Noctes Atticae (2.6.18) - 'that the name of him who burned the Temple of Diana of Ephesus, no one at any time might name'. That is all we have about the deed and its punishment. It sets one pondering. In what sense was it a punishment of Herostratus to ban his name? He was presumably tortured to death. To augment the torture the Ephesian officials no doubt told him his name would be banned. But after they tossed his broken body into an unmarked grave there would be no reason to institute the ban, if punishment is what they sought. 'To the dead fame comes too late', as Martial said (Epigrammata 1.25.8), and so does oblivion. Of course it may have been believed that vengeance could indeed follow far beyond the tomb, and that the shade of the dead would continue to suffer in Hades by knowing that his name has been lost to memory. As each new shade arrived from the upper world, Herostratus' shade would ask how his reputation fared; the new shade would reply, 'Who? …

THE UNRULY COPIES OF DON JUAN

While Lord Byron was among the literary elite of Romantic print culture, his combination of blasphemy, political sedition, and hedonistic morality also made him a great favorite among underground publishers with radical allegiances and unconventional morality. Byron's long poem Don Juan (1819-1824) was the fulcrum for colliding communities within London's rapidly expanding print culture of the 1820s. Increasingly aligned with an underground radical, libertarian, and obscene press, Byron's poem animated debates about the proliferation and mass consumption of popular print. The pirating of Don Juan's later scandalous harem cantos only escalated the debates and ultimately led to legal deliberation over the poem's copyright. In this paper I argue that the controversy that erupted over Don Juan was connected to the emergence of obscenity as a trade and reveals how obscenity began to gather meaning in relation to reprographic media, popular consumption, and orientalism.

She seems to have composed her own life: thinking about Catherine Martin1

Catherine Martin was born Catherine Mackay, the daughter of a crofter family on the Isle of Skye in about 1847 and grew up in the South East of South Australia and the Western Districts of the neig...

One Moment in the History of Reading: Midnight, 18 June 1816

On Wednesday, 3 August 1814, Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote, in the journal that he shared with his lover, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, a characteristically prescient and lucid precis of what we would now call reader-response theory: 'Mary read to me some passages from Ld Byron's poems. I was not before so clearly aware [of] how much of the colouring our own feelings throw upon the liveliest delineations of other minds. Our own perceptions are the world to us' (lMS, p. 9). Two years later, he gave a spectacular demonstration of how our minds can colour what we read (or hear read). The occasion was another reading aloud, an activity which, as Lucy Newlyn has shown, was important during the Romantic period, both for the consolidation of literary coteries (pp. 19-23) and for the promotion of literary works (pp. 61-66). On the evening of Tuesday, 18 June 1816, five English travellers were gathered in the Villa Diodati, a country house outside Geneva rented for the summer by George Gordon Byron, sixth Baron Byron: Byron himself (or Albe, as his friends sometimes called him); John William Polidori, Byron's personal physician; Bysshe; Mary (by then already addressed as 'Mrs Shelley', although Harriet Shelley was still alive); and Mary's stepsister, and Albe's lover, Mary Jane Clairmont (who called herself Claire). 1 Albe recited part of Coleridge's 'Christabel', which he had recently persuaded his own publisher, John Murray, to publish. According to John William's diary:

‘The firmness of a female hand’ in The Corsair and Il corsaro

The dramatic climax of Byron's poem The Corsair comes when Gulnare, a harem slave, seizes a weapon to free herself and Conrad, the pirate whom she loves, from the prison of their common enemy the Pasha Seyd.

A Fragment of a Possible Byron Poem in Manuscript

Previous articleNext article No AccessA Fragment of a Possible Byron Poem in ManuscriptERNEST W. SULLIVAN IIERNEST W. SULLIVAN II Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America Volume 80, Number 1First Quarter, 1986 Published for the Bibliographical Society of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/pbsa.80.1.24303751 Views: 3Total views on this site COPYRIGHT 1986 THE BIBLIOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICAPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Aristarques et poètes : notes préliminaires à une analyse du discours critique sur la poésie dans les revues américaines de 1783 à 1837

This article should be read as an introduction to a complete study of the critics' discourse on poetry in the first half of the nineteenth century in America. We have tried to analyse the significance of the approaches favored by America's judicial critics. The main point here developed is that critics did not try to define poetry ; they could only say what poetry was not. With examples of critical reaction to Wordsworth's and Byron's poems we show that this approach to literature is linked to a conservative vision of life and society.

The Structure of Byron's Major Poems

The Structure of Byron's Major Poems

O'Neill's Dreamer: Success and Failure

FOG, an early play by Eugene O'Neill, written in 1914 and later discredited by the author, depicts the rescue of two shipwrecked men. One of these men, the Poet, the mere sound of whose voice is "unobtrusively melancholy," who is "sick and weary of soul and longing for sleep," at first welcomes the chance to go down with the ship. Then, however, he discovers a woman and a child who need help, saves them, saves himself, and believes that his "past unhappiness is past." The woman and her child, however, die, and when another ship finally picks up the men, the Poet's "face is drawn and melancholy as if he were uncertain of the outcome of this unexpected return to life." His optimistic detour ends, and he remains under the spell of death. In A Touch of the Poet a former officer in Wellington's army, years after battle victories and a considerable comedown in status, still lives with uniform and Byron's poems. Finally forced to prove himself and to defend his honor, he challenges the rich offender but is given a beating by the offender's lackeys and is exposed, as he admits, 'like a rum-soaked trooper, brawling before a brothel on a Saturday night." Joyful music welcomes him into the common crowd; nevertheless, the act seems "a requiem for the dead." Again, a detour ends.

Lord Eldon's Censorship

It well-known that Byron's poetry was the center of a great deal of suspicious attention from the Tory government which was almost continually in office during his career. David V. Erdmann has proposed that the ministry's anxiety was grounded upon the fear of a potential insurrection to be led by Lord Byron; W. H. Wick war sees the official reaction to Byron's poems as of the whole cloth of the government's antipathy to a free and virulently outspoken press. But whatever the attitude of the ministry, the only official actions taken to punish Byron for his poetry were ostensibly the result of moral rather than of political trespasses on his part. Were Byron the only author subjected to punishment on these grounds, it would be obvious that the action was politically motivated, but Robert Southey, poet laureate, received identical treatment. The nature of the penalty—refusal by Chancery to recognize literary property rights—indicates that the fountainhead of the measures taken against Byron's Don Juan and Cain, Southey's Wat Tyler, Shelley's Queen Mab, and the works of several other authors, Whig, Tory, and apolitical, lay in the moral and legal principles of the Chancellor, Lord Eldon.

Two versions of Byron's poem, ‘Ossian's Address to the Sun’

Two versions of Byron's poem, ‘Ossian's Address to the Sun’ Get access Herbert Greenberg Herbert Greenberg Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume 190, Issue 12, 15 June 1946, Pages 256–257, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/190.12.256a Published: 15 June 1946

Byron's poem on Greece

Byron's poem on Greece

Byron's poem on Greece

Byron's poem on Greece

Byron's poems

Byron's poems

Byron's Early Poems

Byron's Early Poems