14 research outputs found
The Lake Poets
âIf Southey had not been comparatively good,â writes Herbert F. Tucker, âhe would never have drawn out Byronâs best in those satirical volleys that were undertaken, at bottom, in order to reprehend not the want of talent but its wastage.â And if Wordsworth and Coleridge had not been dangerously talented, Byron might have spared them some of his stinging sallies. In Table Talk Coleridge proclaimed the conclusion of the âintellectual warâ Byron threatened in Don Juan (XI. 62: 496), declaring Wordsworth the poet who âwill wear the crown,â triumphing over Byron and his ilk for the poetic laurels of the Romantic period. But Byron was not simply an opponent of his contemporaries. His responses to the Lake poets, particularly to Wordsworth, ran the gamut from âreverenceâ (HVSV, 129) then ânauseaâ (Medwin, 237) to Don Juanâs comical though cutting disdain, in under a decade. Focusing on Byronâs relationship with Wordsworth and Coleridge, I will show how Byronâs poetry and drama reveal the range and complexity of his dialogue with his older peers, where, even at their most apparently divergent, the conversation between the poets reveals the depth of the engagement across their works
Exile
Byron rehearsed going into exile in 1809, when he was twenty-one years old. Before setting sail for Lisbon, he wrote, âI leave England without regret, I shall return to it without pleasure. â I am like Adam the first convict sentenced to transportation, but I have no Eve, and have eaten no apple but what was sour as a crab and thus ends my first Chapterâ (BLJ 1: 211). Byronâs sardonic perception of himself as a biblical exile foreshadowed the allusive character of his second longer-term exile at the age of twenty-eight, when his carefully staged exit required an audience (some of the same friends and servants), expensive props (a replica of Napoleonâs carriage) and a literary precursor. On his last evening in England, Byron visited the burial place of the satirist Charles Churchill, and lay down on his grave. It was a performance of immense weariness with life and solidarity with an embittered outcast.Postprin
Lord Byron jugĂŠ par les tĂŠmoins de sa vie. : My recollections of Lord Byron; and those of eye-witnesses of his life.
Translated by H. E. H. Jerningham.Mode of access: Internet