George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824)

George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824)

Lecture VI. Byron, Shelley

George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824)

The second generation of the Romantics – different historical experience: they did not experience the greatness of the French Revolution just the aftermath (Napoleon);

Byron’s life and personality are at least as fascinating as his poetry: an antithetical character:

- he was a beautiful person but half lame from his birth;

- he was an athlete, but struggling with a tendency to grow fat;

- an idol of women and of sexuality but in fact passive towards women (fundamentally homosexual);

- a man of adventure but temperamentally melancholic;

The great object of life is sensation - to feel that we exist, even though in pain. It is this ‘craving void’ which drives us to gaming - to battle - to travel - to intemperate, but keenly felt pursuits of any description, whose principal attraction is the agitation inseparable from their accomplishment. (letters, 6 Sep. 1813)

- a revolutionary character but in fact he was passive in politics;

- the great champion of Greek liberty but he in fact despised the Greeks and died, rather unromantically, of fever at Missolonghi;

- considered the highest of high romantics but his poetic creed was a neo-classical one.

Thou shalt believe in Milton, Dryden, Pope;

Thou shalt not set up Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey;

Because the first is crazed beyond all hope,

The second drunk, the third so quaint and mouthy. (Don Juan, Canto I, stanza CCV)

His life:

- he came from an aristocratic family, but was a déclassé (he unexpectedly inherited his great uncle’s title at the age of 10)

- he was brought up by his neurotic mother and a governess (who seduced him);

- he went to good schools (Harrow), studied at Cambridge;

- grand tour of Europe (Spain, Greece, Albania) – a verse diary in Spenserian stanzas: published in 1812 as cantos I and II of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage;

- ‘I awoke one morning and found myself famous.’ – great success in society;

- marriage: Annabella Milbanke;

His mother was a learnéd lady, famed

For every branch of every science known

In every Christian language ever named,

With virtues equall'd by her wit alone,

She made the cleverest people quite ashamed,

And even the good with inward envy groan,

Finding themselves so very much exceeded

In their own way by all the things that she did.

To others' share let "female errors fall,"

For she had not even one – the worst of all. (Don Juan, Canto I, stanzas X, XVI)

- they separate: in 1816 Byron left England for good;

- Geneva: friendship with Shelley – Childe Harold (canto III);

- 1817: Venice (during this time he finished Canto IV and Manfred);

I would to heaven that I were so much clay,

As I am blood, bone, marrow, passion, feeling -

Because at least the past were passed away -

And for the future - (but I write this reeling,

Having got drunk exceedingly today,

So that I seem to stand upon the ceiling)

I say - the future is a serious matter -

And so - for God’s sake - hock and soda-water!

(On the back of the manuscript of Canto I of Don Juan)

- from 1819 settled with the Countess Teresa Guiccioli (as a cavalier servante) until 1823 when he went to Greece where he died in 1824;

His poetry includes verse tales after the success of Childe Harold I and II; verse drama: Manfred, Cain; – in these the formation of the byronic hero: ‘a man proud, moody, cynical, with defiance on his brow, and misery in his heart, a scorner of his kind, implacable in revenge, yet capable of deep and strong affection.’ (Macaulay)

satires: ‘English Bards and Scotch Reviewers’ (1808), ‘The Vision of Judgement’ (1821), Don Juan (1818-24)

Don Juan

- unpopular at the time but Shelley recognized it as the great poem of the age;

- story: loose, often inconsistent, digressive structure; but the overall plot is suggestive of a grand tour: an epic totality (another version of romantic epic, cf. Wordsworth’s Prelude);

  • occasional parodies of epic conventions (‘Hail, Muse! Et caetera.’; Lambro, the pirate’s return as Odysseus’s into his own house in disguise)
  • epic totality: an omnium gatherum of contemporary life (in the digressions)
  • it is a Romantic epic: the epic totality is achieved through the synthesizing presence of the narrator’s personality (Byron is the real hero)

What makes the tales interesting is first a torrential fluency of verse, and a skill in varying it from time to time to avoid monotony; and second, a genius for digression. Digression, indeed, is one of the valuable arts of the story-teller. The effect of Byron’s digressions is to keep us interested in the story-teller himself, and through this interest to interest us more in the story. (Eliot)

  • technique: conscious use of form suggesting control (ottava rima – as contrasted with blank verse and loose odaic forms), ironic distancing

I want a hero: an uncommon want,

When every year and month sends forth a new one,

Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant,

The age discovers he is not the true one;

Of such as these I should not care to vaunt,

I’ll therefore take our ancient friend Don Juan –

We all have seen him in the pantomime,

Sent to the devil somewhat ere his time.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

Family: born to a very wealthy family of country gentry (his grandfather was made a baronet in 1806, his father Sir Timothy Shelley was a member of the House of Commons);

Education: Eton, University College, Oxford – expelled after 6 months because he co-authored and published a pamphlet entitled ‘The Necessity of Atheism’;

Eventful life:

- London: met Leigh Hunt, mixed in radical circles and eloped with Harriet Westbrook (sixteen-year-old friend of one of his sisters);

- declared himself the faithful disciple of William Godwin; political writing and activity;

- eloped with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin to the continent in 1814;

- 1816: Geneva: friendship with Byron – found his true voice through a critical reading of Wordsworthian ideas: ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, ‘Mont Blanc’;

- Harriet drowned herself – he legalised his relationship with Mary;

- 1817: he was refused custody of his two children by Harriet; 1818 he went to exile to Italy never to return;

- he never settled, his life was a long series of journeys;

His death: he died in a sailing accident in 1822, his ashes buried in Rome;

His works: between 1818 and 1822 he wrote his best work in Italy: ‘Julian and Maddalo’, Prometheus Unbound, The Cenci, ‘The Sensitive Plant’, ‘The Witch of Atlas’, ‘Epipsychidion’, ‘Adonais’, ‘Hellas’, ‘The Triumph of Life’, ‘A Defense of Poetry’. In his life few published works.

Critical reception: his poetry unfavourably received by his contemporaries (criticized on moral grounds); later his poetry was criticized on aesthetic grounds (Eliot, Leavis, Tate, Auden); today he is recognized as one of the greatest romantic conceptualizers (his achievement comparable to Blake’s)

His central themes: the ideal/absolute, mutability

The flower that smiles today
Tomorrow dies;
All that we wish to stay
Tempts and then flies;
What is this world’s delight?
Lightning, that mocks the night,
Brief even as bright. – / Virtue, how frail it is! -
Friendship, how rare! -
Love, how it sells poor bliss
For proud despair!
But these though soon they fall,
Survive their joy, and all
Which ours we call. -
ASIA
while yet his [Jupiter’s] frown shook Heaven, ay, when
His adversary [Prometheus] from adamantine chains
Cursed him, he trembled like a slave. Declare
Who is his master? Is he too a slave?
DEMOGORGON
All spirits are enslaved which serve things evil:
Thou knowest if Jupiter be such or no.

ASIA
Who is the master of the slave? / DEMOGORGONIf the abysm
Could vomit forth its secrets. … But a voice
Is wanting, the deep truth is imageless;
For what would it avail to bid thee gaze
On the revolving world? What to bid speak
Fate, Time, Occasion, Chance, and Change? To these
All things are subject but eternal Love.
***
PANTHEA I see a mighty darkness
Filling the seat of power, and rays of gloom
Dart round, as light from the meridian sun.
– Ungazed upon and shapeless; neither limb,
Nor form, nor outline; yet we feel it is
A living Spirit.
(from Prometheus Unbound)

John Keats (1795-1821)

Family:

– he was the first of four children in the family of a prosperous coachman (his mother the daughter of a respectable and wealthy middle class family – Frances Jennings);

– lost his parents early: his father died in 1804 – his mother re-married: children were looked after by the grandparents and later by guardians; his mother died of tuberculosis in 1810;

Schools:

– Enfield, the Rev. John Clarke’s school (1803-1811);

– 1811: apprenticed to Thomas Hammond, a surgeon;

– 1815-1816: Guy’s hospital; eligible to practice as apothecary, physician, or surgeon;

His poetry:

– first attempts at the age of 19; influence of Spenser (early poetry mawkish, sentimental);

– other influences: Milton, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, William Hazlitt;

– his thoughts on poetry (documented in his letters) much in advance of his practice;

– this might explain his rapid development from the Autumn of 1818 (between this time and August-September 1819 he composed almost all of his greatest poems);

– biographical background: August 1818 he had to come back from a walking tour because of the first signs of tuberculosis; spent the next months nursing his brother who died of tuberculosis in December; 1818 met Fanny Brawne, engagement in 1819 – their love could not be fulfilled because of his illness;

– 1820: he began to spit blood – ultimate despair ended his poetry (travelled to Rome where he died in 1821 – buried in Rome’s Protestant Cemetery)

Some of his most famous poems: ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’, ‘Sleep and Poetry’, ‘Lamia’, ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, ‘Ode on Melancholy’, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, ‘To Autumn’, ‘When I Have Fears’, the Hyperion fragments

The nature of his poetry:

– his version of Wordsworth’s naturalistic humanism; a sense of tragic acceptance;

– unparalleled detachment, disinterestedness: in a letter to his brothers George and Tom he talks about a Negative Capability: a quality ‘which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason –.’