Curs 9.

The 18 century satirize in heroic couples Byrons initial fame appeared to firm his
first poem.English,Bards and Scottish reviewers and his poetical career he continue
to write similar satires.
If he hadnt written anything else he would have been considered as a late initiator
of the satires written by Joe Dryden and Alexander Pope.
Byron considered Dryden and Pope as 2 poetic geniuses superior to the writers of
his own time.Byrons satires are probably the works closest to his critical nature.
4.The Urban Sophistical:Byrons literary reputation will rest upon Don Juan and in
this poem like in other similar poems Byron speaks directly to the reader as a fully
experienced man who was everywhere and did everything.
English Bards and Scottish Reviewers-1809.The poem is inspired by the
Dunciad by Alexander Pope and frequently equals its model.The poet criticized neoclassic critical principles and especially the poetry written by Wordsworth and
Coleridge.
Child Harold Pilgrimage ,Canto I-II:ap11 appeared in 1812 and it was printed
in 11 editions until 1819.The poet insisted that he wasnt identified to the poems
hero.No previous poem in English Literature has such a triumph as Byron said:I
woke up one morning and I found myself famous.Probably,no other poem can
equal Byrons rhetorical quality in presenting exotic landscapes such as Portugal
and Turkey as wild scenes of action such as a Spanish torrid or the Albanians clans
fighting.
Byron involves the romantic desire of the age for an escape to a life for colour and
energy.The theme of the work is the looking for self redirection by entering a dream
world of powerful emotions.
The Corsair-1814 and it was presented in 10000 copies on publication day and
it sold 27000 copies in the first month .Byron sends hos hero,Conrad ti the dark blue
seas of islanda of Greece in a series of adventures disappearing mysteriously in
the end.The main hero seems to be a picture of Byron more more than in other
creation:especially in his desperate desire for freedom and adventure.
Child Harold Pilgrimage.Canto III:1816,was written in Switteland.The poem
doesnt continue the previous 2 cantos but it is a completely different poem.It is a
journal of Byrons journey to the battle fields of Waterloo and down the Rhine to
Switzeland.Byron refers to an experienced young man who tasted all the cups of
good and evil in the world.He presents himself as a reserved person calling himself
from the world and defining it by having a lot of wild adventures.Byron sees poetry
as a purgation for himself,a necessary release of the forces.He considers the great

geniuses of the world dreaming like himself into a hostility to mankind and rising to
glory by creation.
George Gordon Byron ( 1788 1824) was born in London. He inherited the title of
Lord Byron from an granduncle . He took part into the Greek Revolution fighting a
longside the Greeks against the turques.
Characteristics of Byrons work:
Exhuberant romanticism this aspect of Byrons work made him popular.
Romantic passimism: Byron expresses the most obvious way in all literature of
rebellion against his contemporary society.The cause of this rebellion against the
cruel world are:the international chaos of Napoleon Bonapartes age which
disrupted the europeran society,the convention of romantic writing that was
interesting in the themes of sin struggle and remorse.
Byrons own background wchich included his ancestry, his sense of sin and
damnation because of his religious indoctrination,his lead relations with his mother
and his feeling of guilt for his physical effect.
The 18th century satirize in heroic couples. Byron;s intiial fame appeared from his
first poem English Bards and Scotish revieurs 1809. This poem is inspired by
Al.Pope and frequently equals its model. The poet criticized neo clasical
criticalprinciples and especially the poetry written by WordsWorth and Coleridge. No
previous poem in English literature has such a triumph and as Byron said I woke
up one morning and I found myself famous.
Probably no other poem can euqal Byrons rethorical quality in presenting exotic
landscapes such as Portugal and Turkey.
Prometheus -1816 Byron sees the arhetipe of himself in Prometheus ,the titan
who brought the fire to man.Prometheus likes Byrons concept of himself,suffers in
solitude seeing mankind in decay.The poet attributes to Prometheus his own conflict
that in hid participation in the suffering of mankind and the defiance of faith in
trying to make easier human suffering.
Child Harold Pilgrimage IV-1817.The poem continues the 3rd canto but we can
find different elements to consider it a separate poem.It is the describtion of a travel
in Italy,B.leading the reader to Venice,to Florence and to Rome .B.has a good feeling
for the atmosphere of places and he sees the dramatic history of a community .The
theme of a whole poem is that of a destroyed culture.Italy was the land of roman
and renaissance magnificence and it was a symbol of Western society turned into
decay.B.finds comfort in the timelessness of art and beauty.The modern
Prometheus finds meaning only in the expression of his interior forces set against
disease,death and modern life.

Don Juan was begun in September 1818 and it was incomplete at the poets
death.The hero is not the Don Juan of legend,but an imaginary Spanish
Contemporary,a sort of Byron picture before his maturity.
Canto I-Don Juan,a 16 years old native of Seville received a stern education from his
mother Dona Inez.His mothers friend,Dona Julia ,married to the middle age.Don
Alfonso seduces the young woman.Descovered,Dona Julia is sent to a monastery
and Juan is sold into slavery.
Canto II-on the way to Italy,the ship wrecks in a terrible storm and survivers are left
on an overcrowded ships boat.Suffering reduce the survivors to the
cannibalism.Juan is the only one who escape reaching the shore of an island of the
Greek Cyclades.This account of a shipwreak is based upon reading as B.has no
knowledge in this.Juan in nursed to life by a beautiful Greek girl Haidee in the
absence of her pirate father,Lambro.The 2 young persons fall in love .Lambro
returns and seels Juan into slavery.Haidee dies of broken heart.She appeared in
Greek songs cruely treated by her relatives from loving a stranger.
Canto III to IV Juan reaches Instambul and he is brought as a slave by Dultana
Gulbeyaz.She desguises the young man as a girl and hides him in the
harem.Dultana orders Juan to be killed as suspected him of loving a harem girl,but
he escape and he goes to the Russian frontier.
Cnto VI to X-Juan joins the Russian army and takes part into the battle of Ismail.He is
slightly wounded and he is sent to Saint Petersburg.In Saint P.the Court of Catherine
the Great he becomes the latest favourite of the Russian army.Catherine agrees to
send the young man on a diplomatic mission to England.In England he is held up by
a highwayman whom he shoods .He becomes one of the favourites of London High
Society.He is a guest at Norman Abbey.
Byron presents many English aristocrats of his own circles .Juan attracts 3
women:Adeline,his hosts wife,Aurora Raly,a young heiress and the duchess of FitzFulke.
Literary critics of the age considered this poem as a work of a genius.Outraged
moralists asked the suppression of the poem and victorians omitted from the
collections of Byrons verses,moraly condemning it.Only after the First World War
the poem started to be really appreciated.
The poem is the greatest English verse epic since Paradise Lost by Milton and it
was also called the greatest picturesque novel in verse.The theme is the odyssey of
modern man in search of his soul in this open society.Juan has no real pinciples or a
code of life.Oportunastically,he takes what comes exploring the full range of passion
and action without having fixed principles.Juan hadnt achieved maturity or stability
and shows no sign of maturisation.Byron repeatedly affirm his believe in God and in

truth as demonstrated by the human mind on wild.The poem can be considered as

the protest of a perfectionist against the lead state of man.
In his maturity a man who lives many lives in a few years and and knew most of
the fundamental experiences of modern humanity shared with his,the fantastic
range of his observation.
Comedy is the dominant element because life is a comedy for those who
think.Many persons characterized the poem as a satire.but like the satire written by
Al.Pope requires a fixed standard of judgement.The whole point of Don Juan lyes in
mobility .The poet asks man in modern life to accept our world and human nature
for what they are displaying mobility in following the worlds fashion while still
looking for satisfaction in self realization.In a world that makes as false the poet
asks us to be true and simple to ourselves.

SEMINAR(Coleridge)
Kubla Khan-writen in 1897.
In the first lines Colaridge said he had taken opium before dreaming the poem.He
wrote the verses in a hurry when woke up and he was interrupting by his tailor who
demanded payment.After the tailor left,Coleridge returned to the manuscript and
he wasnt able to remember more of the dream thow he was convinced the poem
has some several lines.He could write several hundred lines for his poem instead of
the 54 that exist today.
Kubla Khan is a poem abaut the secondary imagination and a perfect demonstration
of the working of that imagination.
The poetic faculty,sais ColeridgeDisolves,diffuses,dissipates in order to recreatefor
a huge number of elements from a premier imagination.Coleridges powers of the
secondary imagination creates a new and unique unity.The sacred river is the
secondary imagination.A deep intuitive fontaine from the uncouscious reservoir of
nature.It has no conection with rational discipline and it goes when it wants to go.
Kubla Khan tries in his pleasure dome to create the conscious and secure world of
art.The sacred river comes upward from subterranean sources ,follows its natural
course and goes back into uncouscious when it comes from.In its way it reveals
the opposites of warmth and ice that the rational mind cant deal with.Inspired by
the muse of nature represented by the Abyssinian maid Coleridge intends to create
the opposite and reveal the totality of human experience.With such gifts from the
deep of nature,the poet is himself a sacred being ,a prophet having powers of
revelation.

PERCY SHELLEY:1792-1822
Was born in Sessex.He studied at Eaton College and Oxford but he was expelled
from the University for having written a pamphlet.He lived his greatest part of his
life after being expelled from the University in Italy and he wrote his main poems
there.He died before he was 30.
Queen Mab was written in 1813.Queen Mab,the queen of the fairies goes bt a
magic car to a sleeping girl,Iantche who is transported by the Fairy Queen to space
to realize a vision of the worlds development.The poet presents a whole past of
civilization considering it as inadequate because of the non-sciintific point of view
and the cruel exploration of mankind.Monarchy and aristocracy are the causes of
bloody wars and heartless impression .The poet calld any system of class and
privilege as unnatural.
Political tirany is not only governing by force but inculcating brutality in mankind
from the cradle.Religion is a tool to keep the people from asserting this rights.The
poet considers that all human problems as coming from the lead distribution of
goods services and propert.The poet denies creation and sees necessity as the
spiritual form dominating matter and not a strict materidism .His necessity drives to
all things to perfection.He criticizes Christianity,Jesus Christ is seeing as a parish
demagogue.Christian Church is seen as the element of appression and tirany and
atrocities in sanctified bt the priest.
Science will transform the world ,chemistry and a specially electricity that was
recently discovered will perform miracles.Man will go forward driven by necessity to
the age of perfection though the process will be gradual.Reason and emotion will
mix and appression and ingustices mainds.
Alhostor or the spirit of solitude-1816.He doesnt pay attention to the arab girl
in love with him and he experienced a vision of a girl whose voice seems to be his
voice,the voice of his own soul.Awaking,he tries to find his ideal in vain followed the
avenging demers of solitude .Prematurely aged,te poet starts a journey by boat
until he dies.This autobiographic poem begin the formulation of Shellys doctrine of
necessity.The poem is a dream allegory of the poets fate in the world .The poets
psyche imagines its ideal called epipsyche and than try to possine tw epipsyche.The
girl of hid dream is his creation.The poet wonders in the world in search of his
epipsych,but in vain because the vision that is a voice coming from his soul can
never be embodied.Shelley presents the ecstasy and the inevitable tragedy of his
own and all romantic lovers.The lovers imagine the ideal beloved and search the
world for her only to find that no real woman can be the embodiment of the
perfection of his dream.
Hymn to intellectual beauty-appeared in 1817.

Intellectualin the title means spiritual beyond the senses.The poet sais that
beauty is not in the object or in the viewer but in the Platonic idea of beauty that is
a spiritual essence which touches the physical world and carries it to loveliness.
The poet asks himself why man is not given the eternal presence of this Platonic
beauty while instead he suffers from the dualism of love and hate ,despoir and
hope.Attempts by superstition and religion to explore life elements fail.Only the
magnificent of platonic beauty gives grace and truth to appearances and comfort
man in despair .The poet presents the philosophical of logic of transitory beauty.If
man live eternely with the pure ideal he would be an immortal God with nothing to
fight for.Creative imagination is able of forming good and a truth in every man.The
poet dedublates himself to this ideal spirit.He is convinced that the spirit of beauty
will give the dedicated poem universal goodness.
Julian and Maddalo-1824 presents Sheleys association represented by Julian
with Byron represented Maddalo.They go along the Venetian Sands and sunset and
come back after doek? By gondola.The site of a madhouse on an island and the
sound of itsmakes Maddalo have pessimistic statements abaut life,but Julien
replaced with optimistian to them.Maddalo leads Julian to the madhouse to hear
the crise of a man deserted by his lulowd.Maddalo proclaims the uselessness of life
and Julien insists that the soul is free and creative,the evils in mankind exist
because we permit them to exist.
Ode to the West Wind-1819.The poem represents Shelleys search in the physical
world for finding analogies to express his belief the regeneration follows
distruction ,that alteration doesnt mean to forget and that mankind should listen to
the prophetic voices of the poets.Wind and cloud are Shelleys symbols for
spirit,freed from material elements.Shelley uses four tercets and a couplet.The
result is a stanza of 14 lines but the poem doesnt like a conventional sonnet.The
poem presents the wind that carries lives and.,the promise of rebirth.Wind has a
major role in cloud formation,winter or rains represents a promise of fertility to
return with the spring.All lives in the sea and on the land in touched by winter
tireness.The poet wishes to be lifted from the thorm of life as the wind lifts leaves.
With the strength of the wind the poets prophesy of reawakened earth and mens
conquest of evil will be sent to mankind.