COURSE 7

THE POETS: THE YOUNGER GENERATION

1. George Gordon Byron
1788-1824

The French critic Hypolite Taine, in his History of English Literature, in

the late 1850s, wrote only few pages about Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and
Keats while he devoted a long chapter to Lord Byron, “the greatest and the most
English of these artists; he is so great and so English that from him alone we
shall learn more truths of his country and of his age than from all the rest
together.” This comment, The Cambridge History of English Literature states,
reflects the fact that Byron achieved European reputation, while his
contemporaries were admired only in the coteries 1 in England and America. He
gained the fame of the greatest of English poets and the prototype of literary
Romanticism. His influence manifested among minor poets and among major
European poets, novelists, painters and composers – Goethe in Germany, Balzac
and Stendhal in France, Pushkin and Dostoevsky in Russia, Melville in America,
Delacroix, Beethoven and Berlioz.
This statement may puzzle the modern reader since the innovations of
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley or Keats are far more distinct. Byron’s
masterpiece, Don Juan is an instance of the favourite neoclassical type, a satire
against modern civilization, sharing many of the aims and methods of Pope,
Swift, Voltaire and Sterne, whereas Byron’s lyrics are old-fashioned, many of
them being written in the eighteenth-century gentlemanly mode of witty
extemporization2 and epigram or continue the Cavalier tradition of the elaborate
development of a compliment to a lady.
Byron’s main achievement for which he was considered an arch-Romantic
is that he provided his age with what Taine called its “ruling personage”, the
model that contemporaries invest with their admiration and sympathy, “the
Byronic hero”. He is first sketched in the opening canto of Childe Harold, then
in various verse romances and dramas. We find him in Manfred as an alien,
mysterious and gloomy spirit, superior in his passions and powers to the
common run3 of humanity whom he regards with disdain. He harbours 4 the
torturing memory of an enormous guilt that drives him toward an inevitable
doom5. In his isolation he is self-reliant, pursuing his own ends according to his
self-generated moral code against any opposition, human or supernatural. He
exerts attraction towards other characters, most compelling because it involves
their terror at his obliviousness to ordinary human concerns and values. He
1
Coterie = small group of people doing things together (English Assistance UK)
2
Improvisation
3
Run of = period
4
Keep thought or feeling in your mind
5
Fate

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represents the arch-rebel in a non-political form with a strong erotic interest,
imitated in life and art and which helped shape the intellectual and cultural
history of the later 19th century. The literary descendants of the Byronic hero
include Heathcliff in Wuthering Height, Captain Ahab in Moby Dick, Pushkin’s
hero of Eugene Onegin. History of Western Philosophy gives a chapter to Byron,
not because he was a systematic thinker, but because “Byronism”, the attitude of
“Titanic cosmic self-assertion” establishes a stance toward humanity and the
world that entered the 19th-century philosophy and moreover it helped Nietzsche
for the concept of Superman, the hero who is not subject to the ordinary criteria
of good and evil.
Byron’s contemporaries insisted on identifying the author with his
fictional character, nonetheless, according to Byron’s letters and his friends’
testimonies, the character and the poet bears but few similarities, namely
recurrent moods of depression. Otherwise the poet was antithetical to the hero,
he was passionate and wilful and when in good humour, he could be very much
a man of the world in the eighteenth-century style, gregarious, tolerant, witty
conversationalist, having an ironic attitude towards his own activities and those
of the others. Though in public he exhibited an aloof 6 hauteur7, this was only a
mask to hide diffidence when in a strange company. Historically speaking, the
fiction was more important than the actual person.
According to the Oxford Illustrated History of English Literature, George
Gordon Byron was the son of a dashing, but spendthrift 8 father and the Scottish
heiress whom his father married to restore his fortune. When he was ten, on the
death of his great-uncle, he became Lord and heir of Newstead Abbey in
Nottinghamshire. He was educated at Harrow and Cambridge. Despite of his
deformed foot of which he was acutely aware, Byron was a handsome young
man. He had an aristocratic bearing, with special pleasure for action. He
despised “scribbling and scribes” saying “who would write who had anything
better to do?” In 1809, though, he entered the arena, publishing a satire on the
current literary scene, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. In the same year he
set out travelling abroad. The war with France influenced his route; he travelled
to Portugal and Spain and thence9 to Albania and Greece. In Greece he started to
write a poem in Spenserian stanzas10 on his travels, of which the first two cantos
6
distance
7
arrogance
8
extravant spender
9
From there
10
Spenserian stanza, verse form that consists of eight iambic pentameter (Let’s define some terms to help
explain this one. Meter refers to the pattern of syllables in a line of poetry. The most basic unit of measure in a
poem is the syllable and the pattern of syllables in a line, from stressed to unstressed or vice versa. This is the
meter. Syllables are paired two and three at a time, depending on the stresses in the sentence.
Two syllables together, or three if it’s a three-syllable construction, is known as a foot. So in a line of poetry the
cow would be considered one foot. Because when you say the words, the is unstressed and cow is stressed, it
can be represented as da DUM. An unstressed/stressed foot is known as an iamb. That’s where the term iambic
comes from.) lines followed by a ninth line of six iambic feet (an alexandrine); the rhyme scheme is ababbcbcc.
The first eight lines produce an effect of formal unity, while the hexameter completes the thought of the stanza.

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were published after his return to England under the title Childe Harold’s
Pilgrimage. The interest on the poem were not the descriptions of Portugal and
Spain or Albania’s exotic, neither his love for the despoiled 11 places of Greece,
which were to remain with him all his life. What created a stir on its first
appearance on 10 March 1812 was the first encounter with the ‘Byronic hero’.
His qualities were summed by Macaulay12 ‘a man proud, moody, cynical, with
defiance on his brow and misery in his heart, a scorner 13 of his kind,
implacable14 in revenge, yet capable of deep and strong affection’. The character
is somehow similar to Milton’s Satan or figures of contemporary German
literature or the dark and discontented heroes of the Gothic novel. “It had a
delirious effect on the European public” [OIHEL: 297]. In the following years
the poet produced other poems in which we find the same towering 15 heroes,
plots involving crime, infatuation and death: The Bride of Abydos, The Giaour16,
The Corsair.
In England Byron was a Whig nobleman and in one of his few speeches in
the House of Lords he spoke eloquently17 in defence of Luddites18; he was a
regency debauchee19, described by Lady Caroline lamb as “mad, bad and
dangerous to know. In 1815 he got married and from then on his life began to
resemble his poetic hero. The following year he was separated from his wife and
left England for good when rumours about his affair with his half-sister began.
In 1817, while in Italy he published Manfred, a metaphysical verse drama,
set in the Alps, an autobiographical work whose hero rebelled against human
condition, ‘half dust, half deity’ seeks only oblivion.
In 1818 Byron began his major work, Don Juan that remained unfinished
at his death with 16 cantos.
In the second generation of Romantic poets there is a turning away from
the dark, illiberal north to the warmer and more generous climate of the
Mediterranean, though not all of them responded in the same way. Byron did not
see anything else but oppression and hypocrisy in the English society and even
if the southern countries he loved, Italy and Greece were not free either, his
Invented by Edmund Spenser for his poem The Faerie Queene (1590–1609), the Spenserian stanza has origins in
the Old French ballade (eight-line stanzas, rhyming ababbcbc), the Italian ottava rima (eight iambic pentameter
lines with a rhyme scheme of abababcc), and the stanza form used by Chaucer in his “Monk’s Tale” (eight lines
rhyming ababbcbc). A revolutionary innovation in its day, the Spenserian stanza fell into general disuse during
the 17th and 18th centuries. It was revived in the 19th century by the Romantic poets—e.g., Byron in Childe
Harold’s Pilgrimage, Keats in “The Eve of St. Agnes,” and Shelley in “Adonais.” (Encyclopaedia Britannica)
11
Ruined
12
Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay, PC (25 October 1800 – 28 December 1859) was a British
historian and Whig politician. He wrote extensively as an essayist and reviewer. (Wikipedia)
13
Showing disdain or derision
14
Pitiless
15
characterized by extreme or intense emotion or pain (English Assistance UK)
16
Infidel, unbeliever (OIHEL)
17
Expressively (English Assistance UK)
18
one of a group of early 19th century English workmen destroying laborsaving machinery as a protest; broadly :
one who is opposed to especially technological change (Merriam Webster Dictionary)
19
somebody regarded as immoral, unrestrained, and self-indulgent (English Assistance UK)

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evocative lines on The Isles of Greece, in Canto III of Don Juan are a great
hymn to national freedom. Byron died of fever at Missolonghi in 1824 while he
was preparing to fight in the cause of Greek independence. His reputation gain
stature through this embodying the finest qualities of the Romantic hero.

From Canto I
(Don Juan and Donna Julia)

I.

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.

II.

Vernon, the butcher Cumberland, Wolfe, Hawke,

Prince Ferdinand, Granby, Burgoyne, Keppel, Howe,
Evil and good, have had their tithe of talk,
And filled their sign-posts then, like Wellesley now;
Each in their turn like Banquo's monarchs stalk,
Followers of Fame, "nine farrow" of that sow:
France, too, had Buonaparté and Dumourier
Recorded in the Moniteur and Courier.

III.

Barnave, Brissot, Condorcet, Mirabeau,

Petion, Clootz, Danton, Marat, La Fayette
Were French, and famous people, as we know;
And there were others, scarce forgotten yet,
Joubert, Hoche, Marceau, Lannes, Desaix, Moreau,
With many of the military set,
Exceedingly remarkable at times,
But not at all adapted to my rhymes.

IV.

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 Nelson was once Britannia's god of War,
And still should be so, but the tide is turned;
There's no more to be said of Trafalgar,
'T is with our hero quietly inurned;
Because the army's grown more popular,
At which the naval people are concerned;
Besides, the Prince is all for the land-service.
Forgetting Duncan, Nelson, Howe, and Jervis.

The author begins by saying that since his own age cannot supply a suitable hero
for his poem, he will use an old friend, Don Juan. Don Juan was born in Seville,
Spain. The chief models for the poem were the Italian seriocomic versions of
medieval chivalric romances; the genre had been introduced by Pulci in the 15 th
century and adopted by Ariosto in Orlando Furioso (1532). From them, Byron
has caught the mixed moods and violent oscillation between the “sublime and
ridiculous as well as the colloquial management of the complex ottava rima” (an
eight line stanza in which the initial interlaced rhymes (ababab) build up the
comic turn in the final couplet (cc). Byron’s contemporaries thought the poem
unacceptably immoral, but Byron insisted that Don Juan is “a satire on abuses of
the present state of society” and “the most moral of poems”.
The controlling element in Don Juan is the narrator and his temperament
that gives the work unity. The poem is a monologue in the course of which a
story is told. It opens with first person singular and goes on with the storyteller’s
predicament. The voice uses the shifting moods of Don Juan to confide to use
the speaker’s thoughts and devastating judgements on the major institutions,
activities and values of Western society. The creator of the Byronic hero in his
youth, in his later and sadder life created a character-narrator, one of the great
comic inventions in English literature.