Byron's Poetry Research Articles

Struggle and Lonely Sorrow in Byron s Romanticism (Based on Poems the Giaour , the Corsair , the Bride of Abydos and the Prisoner of Chillon )

The article mentions the public-social and literary-aesthetic problems of "Oriental Poems" by George Gordon Byron, one of the most prominent representatives of English revolutionary romanticism in world literature. The author gives a scientific interpretation of Byron's poems "Giaour", "Corsair", "the Bride of Abydos" and "The Prisoner of Chillon" and studies the literary-aesthetic and public-social problems of the poet's revolutionary romanticism. At the beginning and middle of the 20th century, scientific interest in Byron's literary heritage increased in Turkiye and Azerbaijan, and the poet's "Oriental Poems" were translated into Turkish and Azerbaijani. The author notes that Abdulla Jovdat Bey sent the poem “The Prisoner of Chillon” translated from Byron in 1906 as a gift to his close friend Ali Bey Huseynzadeh. Ali bey Huseynzadeh, in his article “English Poetry in Turkish” and the “Prisoner of the Chillon”, published in the newspaper “Hayat”, highly appreciated the translation skills of Abdullah Jovdat Bey and spoke about the ideological and aesthetic merits of the poem. The analysis involved translations of three lines from Byron's “Oriental poems” into Azerbaijani by Novruz Ganjali, Bakhtiyar Vahabzadeh and other poets. The struggle and lonely grief of the romantic heroes of the poet has also been characterized in the article. The “Oriental poems" reflectes the vices committed by Eastern despotism. Militant and romantic, the lonely heroes of Byron's poetry reflect the characteristic features of English revolutionary romanticism and rise to the level of the "Byronic hero". Keywords: "Oriental poems", "Byronic hero", linear translation, lonely hero, progressive romantics, despotism

“How I like English Lords...” Perception of British Culture by Ukrainian Local Nobility of the 19th Century: The Case of the Galagan Family

The article deals with the attitude of the Ukrainian nobility (the landowners of Poltava and Chernihiv governorates) to the British culture of the Victorian era on the example of the Galagan family. Based on the study of diaries, correspondence, and memoirs, it was found that the perception of British culture by the Ukrainian nobility took place thanks to learning English and getting to know English literature and art. In particular, the aesthetics of English romanticism was attractive, which was perceived in a wide range, from admiration for J. G. Byron's poetry to affection for "English parks", according to the model of which the park in Sokyryntsy, the ancestral seat of the Galagans, was laid out. The British were invited to Ukrainian noble families as mentors of children. Communication between tourists from Ukraine and Britain was of great importance while travelling in continental Europe. After all, Ukrainian travellers visited Great Britain, where they could directly get acquainted with its economic achievements and sociocultural structures. Based on these communications Anglomania spread among the highest layers of the Ukrainian nobility, to which the Galagans belonged. It was an idealization of the socio-political system of Victorian Britain, which seemed attractive as an alternative to the bureaucratic absolute monarchy that existed in the Russian Empire. Thus, the Anglomania of the nobility was one of the forms of opposition to absolutism. At the same time, Anglomania could combine with other oppositional ideologies platforms, in particular with Slavophilism, as shown by the example of Hryhorii Galagan.

Statistics and Machine Learning Experiments in English and Romanian Poetry

This paper presents a quantitative approach to poetry, based on the use of several statistical measures (entropy, informational energy, N-gram, etc.) applied to a few characteristic English writings. We found that English language changes its entropy as time passes, and that entropy depends on the language used and on the author. In order to compare two similar texts, we were able to introduce a statistical method to asses the information entropy between two texts. We also introduced a method of computing the average information conveyed by a group of letters about the next letter in the text. We found a formula for computing the Shannon language entropy and we introduced the concept of N-gram informational energy of a poetry. We also constructed a neural network, which is able to generate Byron-type poetry and to analyze the information proximity to the genuine Byron poetry.

Statistics and Machine Learning Experiments in Poetry

This paper presents a quantitative approach to poetry, based on the use of several statistical measures (entropy, information energy, N-gram, etc.) applied to a few characteristic English writings. We found that English language changes its entropy as time passes, and that entropy depends on the language used and on the author. In order to compare two similar texts, we were able to introduce a statistical method to asses the information entropy between two texts. We also introduced a method of computing the average information conveyed by a group of letters about the next letter in the text. We found a formula for computing the Shannon language entropy and we introduced the concept of N-gram informational energy of a poetry. We also constructed a neural network, which is able to generate Byron-type poetry and to analyze the information proximity to the genuine Byron poetry.

‘Who shall now lead?’ The Politics of Paratexts in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Cantos I–II

Until Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812–18), Byron was on the edge of fame. He broke this barrier through his European Tour (1809–11) which provided inspiration for the famous poem. Whilst extending social boundaries, through his meeting with Ali Pasha, Byron expanded the itinerary of the traditional ‘Grand Tour’ to include land, like Albania, previously unmarked by British boots. Byron mirrors his pioneering travel practices in his fiction. On the edges of Childe Harold are footnotes that cover anthropological, topographical, and autobiographical ground, advancing cultural understanding of areas either neglected or misrepresented by previous writers. I argue that, through revisions of these footnotes, Byron sought to dispel and correct myths relating to obscure European nations, perpetuated by ‘irresponsible’ accounts of previous travellers and in doing so strove to educate his readership on the benefits of informed, reasoned debates, built on empirical knowledge. This article establishes a link between Byron's poetry and politics to assess how far his demand for objectivity in literature bled into his political ambitions.

The Union of Eros and Thanatos

The Union of Eros and Thanatos Stu Watson (bio) I recently attended a staged reading of Lord Byron's verse drama, Manfred (1816-1817). This was, despite my having been interested in the topic for almost twenty years, the first time I had actually seen a Romantic verse drama performed in any form. It was apparent, as Manfred appeared and began his first soliloquy, why this was the case: the play almost completely lacks plot, moves only with the whims of the protagonist, and features weakly-filled-out stock characters aside from said protagonist, whose motivations throughout are left largely mysterious. Byron seems to have realized this about his own play, saying it was "mental theater", i.e. drama not meant for an actual stage, but rather a play to be imagined in the mind. If this is the case, why adopt the dramatic form? Byron had already enjoyed enormous success writing long narrative poems by the time of Manfred's composition; was he merely looking to shake things up, try on a new formal costume for his readers, or is there something else at work? I would contend that verse drama, "mental theater," is the mode of poetical writing Byron and later Romantics turned to in order to address the issue eroticism, and more specifically, that of sexual perversity. In Manfred, it is hinted that the protagonist's motivating sin is an act of incest with a sister, a situation that closely mirrors Byron's own affair with his half-sister Augusta Leigh, rumors of which drove him into exile from England. Percy Bysshe Shelley's tragedy The Cenci (1819) deals similarly with the taboos of incest and parricide. The dramatic mode is ideal for treating on this subject because of its essentially voyeuristic nature. Even "mental theater" implies a distinction between actor and audience, creating the kind of distance that is characteristic of sexual fantasies. Thus mental theater lends itself naturally to the playing out of fantasies, to the sublimation of socially unacceptable forms of desire into literary art. Freud postulated in an early version of his essay "The Ego and the Id" that in addition to libido, the erotic drive that he understood to be a fundamental aspect of the human psyche, there is a death drive, embodied in his concept of thanatos, that is possessed of a similarly coupled "death energy" that he called destrudo. Though he would later discard this conception of a kind of "death energy" in order to keep his focus more squarely on libido and to avoid what he worried was an unnecessary dualism, the notion in itself is still useful, in that certain artists seem to manifest exactly such an energy in their works; one thinks of the stories and poems of Edgar Allan Poe, the explorations of evil to be found in the Chants de Maldoror (1869) of Lautréamont, or even the skull-riddled paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat. The notion that this "death energy" might exist additionally presents the possibility that it might be confused with, or compounded into, the erotic drives of libido. For a contemporary of Lord Byron, the verse-drama became the medium for exactly such a conflation. I am alluding to Thomas Lovell Beddoes, sublimely strange poet of eroticized death. His bizarre masterpiece, Death's Jest-Book (1849), is a verse drama seemingly ripped from the Jacobean era yet shot through with an even more superabundant perversity. Like Manfred, it was pragmatically unstageable in the era when it was written due to its content, and it has been seldom staged since, critics deeming it more a collection of interwoven monologues and convoluted plot twists than a proper play. Despite these objections, verses from the work display a curious erotic energy in their hymns to death: "Song from the Waters" The swallow leaves her nest,The soul my weary breast;But therefore let the rain On my graveFall pure; for why complain?Since both will come again O'er the wave. The wind dead leaves and snowDoth hurry to and fro;And, once, a day shall break O'er the wave,When a storm of ghosts shall shakeThe dead, until they wake...

FORMS OF CONFLICT: BYRON'S INFLUENCE ON YEATS

From Yeats's earliest poetry, Byron looms large in his imagination. It is Byron's poetry of conflict, formal dexterity, political outspokenness, and, most crucially, his poetry of personality that offered a compelling model for Yeats, the aristocratically public poet. This article argues for the significance of Byron's influence on Yeats's poetry. Edward Larrissy and Steven Matthews have suggested the influence of Byron on Yeats, and Yeats himself avows the same to H. J. C. Grierson in a letter. Yet, there has been a relative dearth of studies that focus on their poetic kinship. This article shows that the Yeats–Byron bond, present from Yeats's early to his later poetry, involves a shared double manner, celebratory, and mournful, where both poets fuse sardonic urbanity with imaginative felicity.

"Unfallen but About to Fall": The Influence of Byron's Cain on Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

The importance of Byron's verse drama Cain on Joyce's work has been largely limited to considerations of Finnegans Wake. Joyce had a well-annotated copy of the text with him in Trieste when he wrote his first novel, however, and his fascination with Byron was a lifelong affair that extended from youthful infatuation to a more mature engagement with Byron's critiques of culture, society, and individual selfishness. This essay argues that Cain exerts a deep influence on A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and that Joyce incorporates numerous parallels between Cain and Stephen. This symmetry between the two texts casts A Portrait's ending in a deeply ironic light and produces the disillusioned Stephen whom readers meet in Ulysses; furthermore, it indicates Joyce's acknowledgment that isolation, resentment, and estrangement are not the conditions for producing great art.

TRANSFORMATIONS OF BYRON IN THE LITERATURE OF BRITISH INDIA

This essay examines the receptionof Byron's work, and some responses to it, among the poets of the British community in India during the first half of the nineteenth century. The first section sketches some of the routes by which Byron's work and accounts of his life were circulated and read in India and demonstrates the impact of his work on the poets of British India. These poets co-opted Byronic texts into their own writings in the form of epigraphs and other citations and allusions, composed responses to Byron and his work, and imitated the tropes, formats and themes of Byron's poetry. The second section of the essay looks in more detail at selected examples of the many adaptations and imitations of Byron's work that proliferated during this period. In these poems, Byronic models are appropriated by writers whose chosen professions or relationships have the effect of aligning them with the colonial project of the East India Company. They re-imagined the encounter with the romanticized Orient that characterizes many of Byron's works in response to the specific political and cultural contexts of British India in the nineteenth century.

‘Collecting Byron: A Conference in Celebration of the Byron Society Collection’ Drew University, Madison, New Jersey 11-13 April 2014

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. …

Obituaries Anne Barton and Nina Diakonova

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)We are sorry to announce the deaths of Professor Anne Barton, of Trinity College Cambridge, on 11 November, at the age of eighty, and of Professor Nina Diakonova, of the St Petersburg State Pedagogical Institute, on 9 December of last year, at the age of ninety-nine.Internationally famous as a scholar of Shakespeare, Jonson, and Renaissance drama, Anne Barton was also a great admirer of Byron. Born in New York in 1933, she studied for a PhD under Muriel Bradbrook at Girton College, Cambridge, where she subsequently became a Fellow. She left for the University of London before moving to New College, Oxford in 1974 where she lectured for ten years before returning to Cambridge. She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1991. In addition to several papers and articles on Byron, Barton published the excellent lecture Byron and the Mythology of Fact (Nottingham 1968; rpt. in Alice Levine, sel. and ed., Byron's Poetry and Prose, Norton 2009) and the immensely useful students' introduction Byron: Don Juan (Cambridge: CUP 1992). She was the natural choice to write the essay 'Byron and Shakespeare ' in Drummond Bone 's Cambridge Companion to Byron (CUP 2004). The common-sense balance of her approach to Don Juan is seen in such things as[w]hile distrusting and sometimes abusing women, Byron was at the same time probably more sensitively cognizant than any other male writer of the period of the waste and futility of so many of their lives [...] (p. 25).Anne was also well-known as a lover of cookery, regularly hosting lavish parties, antiques and cats (she is survived by two named Damon and Pythias, rechristened from their original names, which were Batman and Robin).Perhaps not so well-known were her skills as an actress, shown memorably in her performance as A Cherub in the reading of The Vision of Judgement given at the International Byron conference at Duisburg in 1996; here her seeming fl irtation with the equally memorable Derek Wise (St Peter) has stuck in the mind. Assisted in preparing for the role by her equally famous husband, John Barton of the Royal Shakespeare Company, she enacted the line 'A Cherub flapped his right wing o'er his eyes' by striking Derek in the face with the edge of her shawl. The comment made by Michael Foot after her London talk 'Ovid's Miss Medea'1 ; that he wasn't clear whether he 'd just heard a talk about, or delivered by Medea ; sums up much about her personality.Nina Diakonova was a famous and very popular Russian literary critic, a professor, a Board Member of the Byron Society of London, and a member of the editorial board of the academic series Literary Monuments. An authority on the history of English Literature, she wrote significant works on Shakespeare, Shelley, Byron, Keats, Dickens, Stevenson, Shaw, and Aldous Huxley. She started teaching in 1934, and through her teaching influenced many students.She herself remembered it this way:'Teaching, both at the University and at home, was, apparently, the main driving force of my life ' (she was married with two sons). 'It seems to me that such a choice has been defined not only by inclination, but also by the perception of it as a sacred duty of the intelligentsia. Thoughts of intelligentsia and of my belonging to it occurred to me very early. …

Bearing Witness: The Green Tragedy

Midway through Jane Austen's Persuasion, Anne Elliot and Captain Benwick, the retired first lieutenant of the Laconia, discuss the relative poetic merits of Walter Scott and Lord Byron. Benwick has been mourning the sudden death of his fiancee, and his decided taste for reading (90) has led him to Byron's poetry as best embodying the impassioned spirit of hopeless agony and those images of broken heart, or a mind destroyed by wretchedness with which he sympathizes in his grief (94). Anne understands Benwick's attraction to Byron ism, but cautions against his aggrieved overindulgence in the emotional intensity of Regency poetry in general, declaring that such work could be seldom safely enjoyed by those who enjoyed it completely, and that the strong feelings which alone could estimate it truly, were the very feelings which ought to taste it but sparingly (94). For Anne, the aesthetics of loss so definitive of Romantic poetry risk leading the reader beset by actual loss to dangerous emotional extremes. Anne Elliot's caution may be seen as not so much a critique of Romantic emotionalism per se--as Sarah Wootton stresses, romantic language and feelings are not purged from [the] novel (30)--as a questioning of the efficacy of poetic excess in the aftermath of a traumatic or catastrophic loss. As Michelle Levy notes, Romantic poets may have generally embraced Edmund Burke's contention that literary texts are capable of grafting a on wretchedness, misery, and death itself (92; noted by Levy 548), but Austen's fictional conversation suggests that such melancholy pleasure is likely counter-productive for someone who is actively grieving; it suggests an outer limit to poetic emotional intensity, or at least the necessity to view affective productions in relation to the context in which they are read. Furthermore, in contextualizing the particular conversation between Benwick and Anne Elliot in terms of the effects of male Romantic poetry on male grief, Austen's scene both troubles the gendered conventions of what Anne Mellor has defined as masculine Romanticism, in which a typically male speaker often plumbs the depths of his affective subjectivity through a construction of grief, and posits the failure of such emotional gambits to address the psychological needs of grieving itself. For Mellor, the more paradigmatic figure here is not Byron but Wordsworth, whose poetry repeatedly records the development of a male subjectivity that is defined through the silencing of the female and the tendency to represent characters, such as Martha Ray in Thorn, Margaret in Ruined Cottage, or Female Vagrant as terminally bereft (19). Austen's Persuasion suggests that such representations of bereavement, insofar as they presume to speak for marginalized others, fail to address adequately the trauma of loss. In this context, Dorothy Wordsworth's prose narrative of the 1808 deaths of George and Sarah Green, which left eight children orphaned and at the mercy of Grasmere's communal charity, furnishes a productive counterpoint to masculine Romanticism. Never intended for publication and offering no aesthetic delight on wretchedness, misery, and death itself, the narrative not only tests the limits of sympathy, as Levy has engagingly discussed, but also, implicitly, the efficacy of the poetic nexus of emotional intensity, loss and male subjectivity Dorothy's brother William helped to define and popularize in the period--and that he embodied in his own poetic response to the Green tragedy, the Elegiac Stanzas, composed in the churchyard of Grasmere. The circumstances of the Green family tragedy and subsequent charity of the Grasmere community have been well mapped by Levy, bin a brief summary of events helps to contextualize my own discussion of trauma and narrative to follow. On Saturday, March 19, 1808, the Greens, subsistence-living cottagers in a remote stretch of Easedale--a narrow valley which De Quincey describes as within a chamber or chapel within a cathedral (128)--hiked over the steep fells behind their cottage to Langdale to attend an auction. …

‘Byron and 1812’ London Byron Society Symposium, Kingsway Hall Hotel 10-14 September 2012

The first day of the London Byron Society's Symposium on the theme of 'Byron and 1812' coincided with a victory parade for the UK's Olympic athletes. Celebration was in the air (as well as several red arrows) as delegates made their way through worse than usual traffic congestion in the capital towards the conference venue. Delegates met to register and enjoy a welcome reception in the Kingsway Hall Hotel in Covent Garden prior to setting offfor John Murray's at 50 Albemarle Street.The conference theme was broadly intended to celebrate the bicentenary of the publication of the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Childe Harold was the first of Byron's works to be published by John Murray. The publisher's descendant, John Murray VI, once said he often had 'the fanciful thought that on the morning that Byron woke up to find himself famous, Murray woke to find himself a gentleman'. The sentiment neatly articulates the mutual benefit the poem brought to poet and publisher - 2012 also marks the bicentenary of Murray's acquisition of Albemarle Street, a location he described as 'peculiarly favourable for the dissemination of any work of eminence among the fashionable & literary part of the Metropolis'. I have worked on Byron and Murray for many years but had never visited Albemarle Street and I cannot describe my excitement as I approached the famous premises. We enjoyed wonderful hospitality from John and Virginia Murray, and a particularly informative talk from Virginia Murray, and were encouraged to wander about, inspecting some treasures which were on display. Amongst several (some disturbingly long) locks of hair were Byron's boots, a beautiful miniature of Caroline Lamb, the manuscript of the first two cantos of Childe Harold, and intriguingly, the notebook from which the memoirs were torn and burned in the upstairs drawing room.The following morning saw the academic programme begin with two superb close readings of Childe Harold I and II from Bernard Beatty (Liverpool and St Andrews) and Michael O'Neill (Durham). Beatty's paper revisited a question that critics have been asking for 200 years and will probably be asking for 200 more - what was it about Childe Harold which led it to take (in his words) 'sudden and entire possession of English minds in 1812?' His answer was to stress the combination of violence, lyrical elegance, and impetuosity in the opening cantos and to offer a fascinating reading of 'the Harold problem'. O'Neill illuminated what he called Byron's 'poetry of departure' in a forensic analysis of the poem, demonstrating the manner by which Byron's poetry often welcomes 'accidental contingency'. Both papers focused on the force and drive of Childe Harold which propels the poem forward - as Beatty reminded us, 'no one does rushing better than Byron'.After lunch, the panel focused on female authors and Byronic heroines. Anna Camillieri (Oxford) began by reminding us of the contrast between Byron's often passive heroes and his lively heroines. With special emphasis on Don Juan, Camillieri argued that it is in the civilised world of conversation that these heroines excel. Caroline Franklin (Swansea) spoke eloquently about Caroline Lamb and Glenarvon, stressing that the novel is a critique of the Byronic hero and exploring its influence on Victorian feminist writing and particularly on 'silver-fork' novels. The concluding paper saw Peter Graham (Virginia Tech) contrast what he called the light and dark side of the spirit of the age, Childe Harold and Pride and Prejudice. 2013 sees the bicentenary of the publication of Jane Austen's novel, and it was fascinating to hear Graham explore it with reference to Byron.The second evening saw delegates enjoy a visit to Melbourne House. I regretted not being able to attend at the time, and regret it even more so after hearing a report of events from Bernard Beatty. He described the walk there on a beautiful summer's evening, through Covent Garden, past Drury Lane Theatre, and the site of Dickens's infamous blacking factory, along the embankment to Melbourne House as 'one of the nicest unexpected events' in recent Byron gatherings. …

‘Without a Sigh He Left’: Byron's Poetry of Departure in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage , Cantos I and II

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.

The Development of Byron's Philosophy of Knowledge: Certain in Uncertainty. Emily Bernhard Jackson.

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe Development of Byron's Philosophy of Knowledge: Certain in Uncertainty. Emily Bernhard Jackson.William C. HorrellWilliam C. Horrell Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 43, Number 4Autumn 2012 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24065348 Views: 4Total views on this site © 2012 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The Byron Journal at Forty

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's Catholic Confessions

This essay briefly considers Byron's general relationship with Catholicism and then examines in greater detail his two very different accounts of confession in The Giaour and Parisina. The Giaour's approach to confession is secular, while Parisina's more religious take on confession sees it as a key that unlocks the dynamic of the Byronic Hero. The essay argues that these aspects of the poems illumine both the genesis of the Byronic Hero and the change in Byron's poetry from 1816 onwards.

Slovenian 19TH Century literary responses to the Poetry of Lord Byron Byronism on the the Slovene Territory in the 19th century

The article examines the influence of lord Byron's poetry through the translations into the Slovenian language in the 19th century. Byron is analyzed through the translations and cultural mediation of the poets dr. France Prešeren, Jovan Vesel Koseski and Josip Stritar, who all, particularly Prešeren, contributed to the development of the Slovenian Romantic Revival movement and Slovenian literature in its own right within the Habsburg and later the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Lord Byron's poetry enabled Slovenian poets and translators to articulate their own national/political identification within the multinational empire.

'Burns and Byron in Scottish, British and European Romanticism' The Byron Centre, University of Manchester 4–5 December 2010

In light of the fact that most of Western Europe had been brought to a standstill in the week immediately prior to the conference, it is a miracle that so many participants actually managed to get to Manchester at all. Interestingly, those who failed the snow challenge were all from other parts of the UK - a triumph for UK public transport and public services! The conference organisers, Gerry Carruthers (Glasgow) and Alan Rawes (Manchester), seemed quite unfazed by the impact of the weather, although we suspect that they were secretly more than a little worried about whether anyone would still be able to make it. This took nothing away from the enthusiasm of the participants and rather promoted a sense of victory over the snow. Located in the historic Samuel Alexander Building, the conference was a collaboration between The Byron Centre at the University of Manchester and the Centre for Robert Burns Studies at the University of Glasgow. It opened on Saturday morning with the first plenary, given by Professor Murray Pittock (Glasgow) and entitled 'The Real Language of Men: fa's speerin?', which offered a lucid close reading of, among other texts, Burns's 'To a Mouse' and 'To a Louse', focusing on their use of idiolects and dialects from a historical and political perspective, and on the particular power of the poems' language. After a coffee break, the first set of parallel sessions commenced. In 'Burns, Byron and Scotland', chaired by Gerry Carruthers, Colin Clark (Charles, Prague) presented his paper, 'Hell's Hot Jurisdiction: Byron, Burns and the Poetics of Transgression and Transcendence'. This unravelled the complexities of the Calvinist literary legacy in various well-known works by Burns and Byron. Inspired by the portraits of Burns and Scott (both freemasons) and Byron and Shakespeare (neither normally linked with freemasonry) hanging in the lodge room of Lodge Canongate Kilwinning, Andrew Prescott (Glasgow) then explored some interesting connections between Burns and Byron and freemasonry in his wide-ranging paper, 'Annexing Reputation: the Masonic Reputations of Byron and Burns'. The other parallel session, 'Burns and Byron in British Romanticism', chaired by Alan Rawes, was marked by the first arctic-weather absence, that of Will Bowers (Oxford), whose paper would have been on 'Byron, Hunt and the Genesis of the Italian Fashion'. Peter Francev (Mount San Antonio College) was present, and spoke on 'Byron and the Mistress Poem', discussing the question of whether Teresa Guiccioli was or was not a source of inspiration for Byron's poetry, looking closely at works such as 'Stanzas to the Po', 'Stornelli' and 'The Prophecy of Dante'. The session then closed with Adam White (Manchester), whose paper, 'Burns, Byron and John Clare', argued that Clare drew on the lyric poetry of Burns and Byron to construct a haunting, complex and mysterious female figure through which to imaginatively explore farflung, exotic places. The second plenary speaker of the day, Brean Hammond (Nottingham), scheduled for after lunch, was defeated by the Nottinghamshire snow, but his paper was not. It was very competently delivered by Alan Rawes. Entitled 'The Ethical Turn in Literary Criticism: Burns and Byron', Hammond's paper examined the issue of ethical reading in relation to the problematic cases of Burns and Byron - two poets who have often been seen as unethical in both their lives and work. To explore notions of the performativity of the self and its aversiveness, and how these fit with the idea of poetic truth in both Burns and Byron, Hammond gave an insightful analysis of 'Ae Fond Kiss' and 'So We'll Go No More A-Roving', to the musical accompaniment of Leonard Cohen's husky rendering of the latter. The afternoon tea and coffee break was followed by two more parallel sessions: one dealing with 'Burns, Byron and Romantic Celebrity' and the other with 'Burns, Byron and other European Writers'. In the Romantic celebrity session, chaired by Murray Pittock, Hannah Doherty (Stanford) opened with a paper on 'Byronic Advertising: Selling Romanticism in the Early Nineteenth Century', which explored the many ways in which Byron's name was put to use for publicity purposes during the latter part of his life, highlighting especially the political associations evoked by its eclectic use. …

Poet Interrupted: Differences in the Emotionality and Imagery of Byron's Poetry Associated with His Turbulent Mid-Career Years in England

The Dictionary of Affect in Language was employed to compare two parts of Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, written before and after an interruption of several turbulent years in England. The post-interruption part of the poem employed fewer extreme emotional words and more abstract words than the pre-interruption part. In a second analysis, poems written during the interruption and poems written before and after Childe Harold were examined, along with it, in terms of emotion, imagery, and linguistic richness. Two variables--year and an interruption dummy coded as 1 for publications between 1812.5 and 1816.17--predicted observed differences accurately. Byron's poetry became linguistically richer, more abstract, and less passionate across time, and it was emotionally more negative and linguistically simpler during the turbulent years. Differences between the two parts of Childe Harold were best explained on the basis of time-dependent growth curves rather than the interruption.