Lord Byron

Lord George Gordon Byron (1788-1824) was as famous in his lifetime for his personality cult as for his poetry. He created the concept of the 'Byronic hero' - a defiant, melancholy young man, brooding on some mysterious, unforgivable event in his past. Byron's influence on European poetry, music, novel, opera, and painting has been immense, although the poet was widely condemned on moral grounds by his contemporaries. George Gordon, Lord Byron, was the son of Captain John Byron, and Catherine Gordon. He was born with a club-foot and became extreme sensitivity about his lameness. Byron spent his early childhood years in poor surroundings in Aberdeen, where he was educated until he was ten. After he inherited the title and property of his great-uncle in 1798, he went on to Dulwich, Harrow, and Cambridge, where he piled up debts and aroused alarm with bisexual love affairs. Staying at Newstead in 1802, he probably first met his half-sister, Augusta Leigh with whom he was later suspected of having an incestuous relationship. In 1807 Byron's first collection of poetry, Hours Of Idleness appeared. It received bad reviews. The poet answered his critics with the satire English Bards And Scotch Reviewersin 1808. Next year he took his seat in the House of Lords, and set out on his grand tour, visiting Spain, Malta, Albania, Greece, and the Aegean. Real poetic success came in 1812 when Byron published the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage(18121818). He became an adored character of London society; he spoke in the House of Lords effectively on liberal themes, and had a hectic love-affair with Lady Caroline Lamb. Byron's The Corsair (1814), sold 10,000 copies on the first day of publication. He married Anne Isabella Milbanke in 1815, and their daughter Ada was born in the same year. The marriage was unhappy, and they obtained legal separation next year. When the rumors started to rise of his incest and debts were accumulating, Byron left England in 1816, never to return. He settled in Geneva with Percy Bysshe Shelley,Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and Claire Clairmont, who became his mistress. There he wrote the two cantos of Childe Harold and "The Prisoner Of Chillon". At the end of the summer Byron continued his travels, spending two years in Italy. During his years in Italy, Byron wrote Lament Of Tasso, inspired by his visit in Tasso's cell in Rome,Mazeppa and started Don Juan, his satiric masterpiece. While in Ravenna and Pisa, Byron became deeply interested in drama, and wrote among others The Two Foscari,Sardanapalaus, Cain, and the unfinished Heaven And Earth. After a long creative period, Byron had come to feel that action was more important than poetry. He armed a brig, the Hercules, and sailed to Greece to aid the Greeks, who had risen against their Ottoman overlords. However, before he saw any serious military action, Byron contracted a fever from which he died in Missolonghi on 19 April 1824. Memorial services were held all over the land. Byron's body was returned to England but refused by the deans of both Westminster and St Paul's. Finally Byron's coffin was placed in the family vault at Hucknall Torkard, near Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire.

Byron was one of the most important poets of the Romanticism, but he was known not only for his great poems, but also for his personal life. It was filled of love affairs, debts, sodomy, and even pedestrian and incest acts. Lord Byron was a very socially active poet and wrote So Well Go No More A-Roving at the age of twentynine. He was notorious for living his life indulgently with love affairs and wealth, and in this poem, Byron realises his dilapidated physical and spiritual state due to the uncountable number of nights being relentless and making love. A melancholy tone is built up through auditory effects, and by employing various techniques, Byron expresses his view with vividness that love is a powerful and irresistible force yet something that is not eternal.

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This short and succinct poem makes effective use of auditory features. It begins with long and slow O sounds, Well go no more a-roving, and implies the poets weary and exasperated consciousness. A moaning effect is created by this assonance, which may be Byrons reflection on his physical state. In addition, sibilance is used in the second stanza, For the sword outwears its sheath, which also extends the delicate sound of s conveying Byrons state of fragility. Also, that phrase is very smooth when enunciated, further emphasising Byrons listlessness due to his increasing age and his rather unscrupulous way of recreation. Bryon uses the moon as a symbol for the passion for his wish to make love. The phrase, So late into the night moon be still as bright suggests that Bryon believes that there is no difference between day and night to him. From the first stanza, we can infer that Bryon does not believe night is for sleeping, and wants to waste no time of his life and continuously indulge in affairs. In the last sentence of the poem, this same idea is reinforced as the poet accepts that he cannot continue this lavish love life by the light of the moon. Despite Lord Byrons limitless desire for romance, he acknowledges his feebleness of body and mind, which shows that Byron has a hint of sensibility in him despite his rather immoral and profuse lifestyle. There are two distinct innuendoes of the second stanza. The sword may have a phallic allusion, while the sheath is a symbol of a female. The phrase the sword outwears its sheath, indicates that Byron is now tired and has had enough. Otherwise, the sword may represent Bryons spirit or conscience, while the sheathe is what contains his spirit, which is his body. In other words, Byrons way of acting due to the influence of his soul has taken its toll on his outer appearance, and therefore he recognises the need to take a break from his usual life. By saying that The heart must pause to breathe and love itself must have rest Byron finally acknowledges that he has lived beyond his physical capabilities and admits that it is difficult to restrain oneself from something as compulsive as love, but failure to do so will result in morbid consequences. The poem So Well Go No More A-Roving boldly portrays the character of Byron, whose life was full of luxuries and women. He uses this poem to express his need to cease his activities, as at the age of twenty-nine, he was becoming severely enervated. Due to his extravagant lifestyle, Lord Byron died at age thirty-six. Despite Byrons insatiable passion for more love, he admits that he has been worn out and must stop a-roving. In the poem we also perceive the allusions to the nature, which was very common in Romanticism poems. We can see it in the first stanza, So late into the night (2nd line) and And the moon be still as bright (4th line), and especially on the third stanza, when he says Though the night was made for loving on the 9th line, then And the day returns too soon on the 10th, and finally By the light of the moon in the last one.

Don Juan
Don Juan is a satiric poemby Lord Byron, based on the legend of Don Juan, which Byron reverses, portraying Juan not as a womanizer but as someone easily seduced by women. It is a variation on the epic form. Byron himself called it an "Epic Satire" . Modern critics generally consider it Byron's masterpiece, with a total of over sixteen thousand individual lines of verse. Byron completed 16 cantos, leaving an unfinished 17th canto before his death in 1824. Byron claimed he had no ideas in his mind as to what would happen in subsequent cantos as he wrote his work. When the first two cantos were published anonymously in 1819, the poem was criticized for its 'immoral content', though it was also immensely popular
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INTRODUCTION Don Juan (1819-24) is considered Byron's foremost achievement and one of English literature's great long poems. Variously described as a satire, epic, and novel in verse, the unfinished work defies critical categorization despite the consensus that it contains some of the sharpest social criticism in the English language. Writing in an animated style, Byron utilized a variety of narrative perspectives to comment on a wide range of concerns, including liberty, tyranny, war, love, sexuality, hypocrisy, and the mores of high society. The poet's ironic observations and brutally candid portrayal of human weaknesses garnered widespread condemnation from his contemporaries, who subjected Don Juan and its author to an unforgiving and almost relentless campaign of personal slander and critical abuse. Today, however, critics regard Byron's complex, profoundly skeptical yet often humorous work as a remarkable anticipation of both the mood and thematic occupations of modern literature. Plot and Major Characters Don Juan follows the travels and relationships of a youthful protagonist who, though he shares the same name, bears little resemblance to the heartless libertine of popular European legend. Juan's story, however, represents only a part of Don Juan. Through the series of adventures as overprotected teenager, castaway, lover, slave, soldier, kept man, and ornament in English society, Byron deliberates on a vast array of social, political, poetic, and metaphysical topics. Byron's use of a narrator with a distinct personality, as well as the presence of the poet's own voice in the work, allows him simultaneously to tell Juan's story and to comment on it from various perspectives, a technique that contributes to the ironic qualification of nearly every level of meaning in the poem. The poem begins with Juan's birth to Don Jose and Donna Inez, his education, and his early love affair with Julia, wife of Don Alfonso of Seville. Subsequently, the poem moves from one geographic areaand transformative episodeto another: a shipwreck on the voyage from Seville; a romantic encounter with Haide on a Greek island; enslavement by Haide's pirate father, Lambro; sale to Gulbeyaz, a Turkish sultana; escape and subsequent participation in the Siege of Ismail; service in Russia for Catherine the Great; and finally entrance into English aristocratic society and a possible affair with the Duchess of Fitz-Fulke. While his experiences and geographic range are vast, Juan's journeys are beset with disillusion. His romantic encounter with Julia dissolves into farce when Alfonso bursts into Julia's bedroom. Haide offers a chance at true love, but the tryst is thwarted by the reappearance of Lambro. Juan next encounters the evils of war and conquest, imperialistic tyranny, and the hypocrisies of English society. Aurora Raby appears to offer another opportunity for romance, but is displaced by the flirtatious Duchess. Nothing in Don Juan is as idyllic as on its surface it seems. Grand passions and lofty ideals are consistently undermined by vicious schemes. Major Themes Although many of Byron's contemporaries focused on the poet's indictment of English high society in Don Juan, the poem actually contains myriad subjects and offers sardonic commentary on a vast range of societal ills. Upright Regency-era views of love and sexuality are among Byron's central targets, but Don Juan also offers biting commentary on war, religion, restraints on personal liberty and freedom of speech, and injustices rendered upon society's weakest inhabitants. A passive character, Byron's Juan reacts to, rather than manipulates, the world around him. Brave, resourceful, but essentially without motivation or direction, he is a victim of a harsh, hypocritical world. By casting outside forces as corrupting influences on a character traditionally depicted as extravagant and callous, Byron reversed popular legend to suggest that society, not the individual, bears responsibility for evil in the world. While Juan is largely regarded as an innocent victim of the harsh world in which he lives, the poem's narrator provides a more hardy voice. A continually shifting character who at times represents Byron, the narrator sympathizes with the weaknesses displayed by the various characters inDon Juan, although his overall tone is
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one of cynical amusement. His eventual argument that pity, humor and compassion must counteract a chaotic, unfair world becomes the poem's overarching message.
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The English poet Lord Byron was one of the most important figures of the Romantic Movement (17851830; a period when English literature was full of virtuous heroes and themes of love and triumph). Because of his works, active life, and physical beauty he came to be considered the perfect image of the romantic poet-hero.

The most notorious Romantic poet and satirist. Byron was famous in his lifetime for his affairs with society women, Mediterranean boys, and prostitutes. He created his own cult of personality, the concept of the 'Byronic hero' a defiant, melancholy young man, brooding on some mysterious, unforgivable in his past. "There's not a joy the world can give that it takes away / When the glow of early thought declines in feeling's dull decay, / 'Tis not on youth's smooth cheek the blush alone, which fades so fast, / But the tender bloom of heart is gone, ere youth itself be past." Byron's influence on European poetry, music, novel, opera, and painting has been immense, although the poet was widely condemned on moral grounds by his contemporaries.
In 1807 Byron published his first book of poetry, Hours of Idleness. In the preface he apologized, "for obtruding [forcing] myself on the world, when, without doubt, I might be at my age, more usefully employed." The book was harshly criticized by the Edinburgh Review. Byron counterattacked in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers(1809), the first manifestation (sign) of a gift for satire (making fun of human weaknesses) and a sarcastic wit (making fun of someone or something in a harsh way by saying the opposite of what is meant), which singled him out among the major English romantics, and which he may have owed to his aristocratic outlook and his classical education. In 1809 a two-year trip to the Mediterranean countries provided material for the first two cantos (the main divisions of long poems) of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Their publication in 1812 earned Byron instant glory. They combined the more popular features of the late-eighteenth-century romanticism: colorful descriptions of exotic nature, disillusioned meditations on the vanity of earthly things, a lyrical exaltation of freedom, and above all, the new hero, handsome and lonely, yet strongly impassioned even for all of his weariness with life.

Byron's 'Don Juan'

Byron's epic poem 'Don Juan' deals with the Byronic hero. However the protagonist is not a straight-foward hero, as he has qualities of an anti-hero. The Byronic hero is an important element of Romanticism poetry and was greatly influential for many other writers. Much of Byron's poetry has a hero at the centre, and by far the most famous poem of this kind is the mock-epic Don Juan. Byron, like Juan, carried out various heroic feats during his lifetime. He travelled on a tour of Portugal, Spain, Gibraltar, Malta, Albania and Greece. Whilst on his travels he swam the entire Hellespont sea and saved the life of a young Turkish girl who was convicted of sexual misconduct, which was quite possibly the influence for Juan saving a little girl from being killed during the Russian siege of Ismail.
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Sure enough, Don Juan is based on Byrons own experiences and Juan could be seen as representing him. Peter J. Manning develops this idea when he says that the Byronic hero is a fiction responsive to the fears and desires of its author. (Byrons Imperceptiveness to the English Word, Peter J. Manning, p.225). The slaughter of 25,000 Greeks by the Turks in spring 1822 led to a desperate plea for support. As a result the London Greek Committee was formed and Byron joined eagerly. He went out to Greece and commanded an elite private army to fight, however he would never set foot on the battlefield as he contracted a fever which led to his death. However, he was regarded by the Greek people as a national hero. Byrons passion for Greek liberation from the Turks and his mock epic poem Don Juan both remained unfinished. He never actually fought, in much the same way that he didnt succeed in completing Don Juan. Conversely, the Byronic hero has both heroic and anti-heroic qualities, which amounts to difficulty when deciding whether to sympathize with him or not. The protagonists heroic qualities can be seen when Juan is first introduced and has some promise, he is described as having the typical characteristics of a hero handsome and slender, however his mother doesnt feel that he is yet a man. He is also wise, we can see this when Byron comments that, An only son left with an only mother is brought up much more wisely than another. (Duncan Wu, ed. 2006, Romanticism, An Anthology, third edition, p.946 ). Further on, the narrator tells the reader of how his mother encouraged him to learn the arts, languages (including Latin and Greek) and the sciences. Juan fervently read these books, In all these he was much and deeply read (Duncan Wu, ed. 2006, Romanticism, An Anthology, third edition, p.947). t seems Byron is saying that being well read and learned is a heroic quality. For example, he is bought by a sultana and smuggled into her harem, he then makes his escape the next morning. He fights in the Russian siege of Ismael and is sent to St. Petersburg to inform Catharine the Great the news of their victory. When looking closely at Don Juan we see that Byron goes into a considerable amount of detail concerning how he is going to write the poem, and that unlike many other poets who start mid-story, he will begin at the beginning. The narrator is therefore almost as prominent as the hero, as the introduction conveys more about the writer than it does the central character. Byrons chatty, digressive and ironic tone creates the mock-epic feel of the poem. This destabilizes the readers sense of what we are reading and why. The writer is very persuasive as he frequently interrupts the plot and digresses, so we often hear about the narrators experiences. Because of this it takes a long time to cover the plot as he gets distracted a lot, the narrator being very dominant.

The story of Don Juan first appears in an old Spanish legend concerning a handsome but unscrupulous man who seduces the daughter of the commander of Seville and then, when challenged, kills her father in a duel. In the original version, Don Juan mockingly invites the statue of the father to a feast; the statue appears at the banquet and ushers Don Juan to hell. There are many re-tellings of this story in drama and theatre; Mozart used the story for his opera Don Giovanni (1787). Hero or Anti-hero The poem begins "I want a hero"; that is, "I need a hero for my story." Given the glimpse of the time that we are given in stanzas 1 and 5, why is finding a hero in this age difficult? Is Don Juan a hero or an anti-hero? How has Byron changed him from the original Don Juan? Compare Byron's Don Juan to Porphyro. Byron's Don Juan is possibly a parody of the romantic hero--acted upon rather than active, putty in the woman's hands, terrorized by her outraged husband, caught in comical and farcical situations that strip him of any supposed dignity. But if he's not the kind of hero to be feared and respected, is there nevertheless something attractive about him? And is he in part likeable for the very things that make him NOT a traditional hero? If so, is there a positive side to "wanting" a hero?
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The Educated Intellectual Woman There's some pretty unkind satire in Byron's treatment of the educated woman (Although Byron denied any connection, certain aspects of this section seem to reflect Byron's attitude to his wife, from whom he separated after one year of marriage.) Note the way that Byron uses bad rhymes to make fun of Donna Inez and to ridicule her seriousness ("so fine as" to rhyme with "the brain of Donna Inez"; "intellectual" to rhyme with "hen-pecked you all.") Part of the humour derives from the apparently-common assumption that the educated and intellectual woman will be aggressive and domineering. Remember that Mary Wollstonecraft , in arguing for a better education for women, felt it necessary to reassure her readers that they need not fear that women would then become "masculine." Don Juan's Education One of the reasons why education is mocked is its association with sexual repression and a puritanical approach. (Again, think of Blake's depiction of the repressive and deadening nature of religion in "the Garden of Love.") In stanza 40, Byron exposes the contradiction of elevating the classics as an important part of education, yet then being embarrassed by the sexual component in ancient myth and epic. In stanza 44, Byron has fun with an even more ridiculous aspect of repressive education: The Classics are published in expurgated versions, in which any lines with sexual references in them are removed from the text, so that the text may be taught to schoolboys without fear of corrupting them. But we are then told that, in respect for the great writers, the editors put all the excised lines in an appendix at the back of the book--thus giving the schoolboys a concentrated bit of pornographic reading in one dose. The Attractive and Sexual Woman Donna Julia is presented with a mixture of sincerity and fun. In stanza 61, for example, the elevated though rather conventional praise of the woman's beauty is suddenly deflated by the sudden lowering of tone in the last five words. The comic reversal, however, makes fun not of Donna Julia but of the poet, laughing at the lover's tendency to idealize (and at the embodiment of such idealization in the love sonnet) and bringing love down to a matter-of-fact human level. Donna Julia herself, however, still follows the pattern of the idealized heroine (compare Madeline and Juliet): pretty, gentle, sweet, sexually-attractive and even sexually responsive but also passive, submissive, self-sacrificing, and accepting of her fate to the point of victimization. In the early episode, Donna Julia breaks somewhat out of this role by being the older (23 years old!) married woman and not the innocent girl. Byron thus somewhat reverses gender roles and has the sexuallymature woman take a more active role in seducing the naive and innocent young man. However, at the end of the Canto, Donna Julia's farewell letter to Don Juan (as she departs this life to enter a convent) has her slip back into the patient, faithful, devoted, deserted "wife": "Mine is the victim, and would be again;" (l. 1532) "Man's love is of man's life a thing apart, 'Tis woman's whole existence;" (ll. 1545-46) Though Donna Julia goes off to a convent, there is a strong sense of love being her religion: "To all, except one image, madly blind" (l. 1566) Note that when Donna Julia speaks in her own voice, the satire goes into the background; the male idealization of woman reasserts itself for a brief moment.
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The Nature of Love Stanzas 90-94 present a satirical look at the young lover as romantic dreamer. Byron has a lot of fun laughing at philosophical, metaphysical conceptions of life and love, suggesting instead that we would be better to ground our responses in physical reality: "eyes" (l. 1592) and "dinner" (l. 1594) Note his satirical treatment of Wordsworth and Coleridge (stanza 91). Whereas the Victorian critic Arthur Hallam praised Wordsworth as a "poet of reflection," for Byron Wordsworth's speculations (especially on the spiritual side of life) were out of touch with reality and at worst simply incomprehensible (see also l. 1773). Later, in stanza 116, Byron again suggests that Platonic idealism is divorced from reality, but here he goes farther to imply that such idealized notions of love function simply as a convenient mask of self-deception and hypocrisy. The more cynical view of love that hovers in this Canto, and that develops more fully in the rest of the poem, is that love is in reality a game of mutual self-deception, whose goal is merely sensual satisfaction. The Plot Byron uses the old plot of adultery and revenge but converts it into a bedroom farce. The potentially serious theme is deflated by common details and low characters. Note the ridiculous behaviour of Don Alfonso (stanza 143), the detail of the chamber pot under the bed (stanza 144), the lawyer jokes (stanzas 159 and 164), the near suffocation of Don Juan under the covers between two women (stanzas 165-6), and the use of sudden comic reversal in the discovery of the pair of shoes (stanza 180). Note also the somewhat unheroic manner of Don Juan's escape (stanza 186). The Narrator The narrator is in many ways a more important figure than Don Juan in this first Canto. Perhaps the real tension here is between the non-ironic and selfless view of love embodied in Donna Julia's letter and the cynical skeptical view advanced by the narrator. (Like "The Prelude" and "Michael," this poem presents a "double-plot": the story and the writing of the story.) The narrator remains aloof from his story, refusing to take the role of the serious, reflective poet. The higher aims of poetry are mocked (stanzas 133-4). The figure of the poet himself becomes a figure for laughter with his comic entrance into the story (stanza 24). In his asides and remarks, he remains entertaining, witty, unpretentious, colloquial, and earthy. His attitude seems to be one of world-weariness mixed with sense of humour. What is Narrator's Point of View? Regarding idealism, he is clearly dismissive, although charitably so toward the young. Regarding love, he seems disillusioned and cynical. He implies that the real pleasure in love lies in the illusion of romantic passion. This being so, he suggests that reality is self-generated and subjective (stanza 214). Love is a product of desire; we see love's presence because we want it to be there, not because it "really" is. "The illusion's gone forever" (l. 1717) "The credulous hope of mutual minds is o'er" (l. 1726)
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The narrator suggests that now, in his maturity, he approaches life more realistically, at a lower level of expectation. There is every indication, however, that within cynicism there lurks a buried, lost romanticism. Perhaps the cynic is closer to the romantic than to the realist. The cynic's posture of aloofness derives from the fact that he understands romantic intensity too well. The Function of Byron's Satire Like Pope ("The Rape of the Lock"), Byron satirizes his society, but whereas Pope's satire attacks lack of seriousness , Byron's laughter is aimed at pretentious seriousness. Pope's mock epic reminds his audience of the "true values' embodied in the serious epic; Byron's comic epic laughs at the high expectations and ideals embodied in the epic, seeing them as excessive and unrealistic--at least for his time. If there are positive values endorsed in Byron's poem, perhaps they are the values of frankness and openness. Byron saw himself as the foe of "cant"--the opponent of false virtue and hypocrisy. And he poem is still a celebration of life, and of its pleasures--such that they be.

Byronic hero
Perhaps the most significant element to be pulled from the vast amount of important and celebrated literature of the 19th century Poet Lord Byron is his contribution of the character he created known as the Byronic Hero. As Lord Byron's appellation, the Byronic hero is an important literary character, which proves useful when one attempts to understand and grasp the literary style that lord Byron wrote in, and the person that he was. The Byronic hero, who is first introduced in 1812 in the beginning stanzas of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, immediately conveys the message to the reader as that of a unique individual. "The Byronic hero exhibits several characteristic traits, and in many ways he can be considered a rebel. The Byronic hero does not possess "heroic virtue" in the usual sense; instead, he has many dark qualities. With regard to his intellectual capacity, self-respect, and hypersensitivity, the Byronic hero is "larger than life," and "with the loss of his titanic passions, his pride, and his certainty of self-identity, he loses also his status as a traditional hero" The Byronic hero is often considered to be alone. He is exiled, in many cases willingly, and isolated from society. His satanic acts and risky lifestyle contribute to this immensely. These attributes are often seen not only in Byron's work but in himself as well. As a young student, he often drank from a skull to impress friends. Byron was also regarded as a sinner, and was known for his outrageous social life, which had him frequently attending parties, and at many times cheating on his wife. This character might not seem to be a hero in any sense, however upon further examination one discovers a new kind of hero. One whose independence, freedom and need for escape can been admired by...

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