英美文学选读学习笔记 George Gordon Byron

Byron (1788-1824) was born into an ancient aristocratic family. His father, Captain John Byron, was a wild but irresponsible profligate; and his mother was a weak but passionate Scotswoman. To him had been given the passionate temper of both father and mother. When he was only three years old, his father died. Then he and his mother lived in loneliness and poverty in Scotland. At the age of ten, Byron inherited the  of a baron and a large estate. He was educated first at Harrow and then Cambridge. Though he was born lame, he was good at sports, especially at swimming. According to Shelley, everything he did was affected by his club-foot which made him feel sore and angry all his life. In 1807 a volume of Byron's poems, Hours of Idleness, was published. A very harsh review of this work in the Edinburgh Review prompted a satirical reply from Byron in heroic couplets, end English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809), in which Byron lashed not only his reviewers, but also the conservative schools of contemporary poetry, showing his lasting contempt for what he considered the common place and vulgarity of the "Lake Poets."

In 1811, Byron took his seat in the House of Lords, and made vehement speeches, attacking the reactionary policy of the English government, and showing his great sympathy for the opssed poor. The publication in 1812 of the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, a poem narrating his travels between 1809 and 1811 in Europe, brought Byron fame. He then said: "I awoke one morning and found myself famous." In the following two years, he had written a number of long verse-tales, generally known as the Oriented Tales, with similar kind of heroes. In 1815 Byron got married to Anna Isabella Milbanke. A year later, his wife left him and refused to come back. Rumors about his incestuous relationship with his half-sister Augusta and doubts about his sanity led to his being abused and decried. So in anger and disgust, Byron left England in 1816 and never returned.

Byron first went to Switzerland, where he made acquaintance with Shelley. In Geneva, he wrote the third canto of Childe Harold and the narrative poem The Prisoner of Chillon (1816). He  established residence in Venice, where in the three years from 1816 to 1819 he produced, among other works, the verse drama Manfred (1817), the first two cantos of Don Juan (1818-1819), and the fourth and final canto of Childe Harold (1818). While in Italy, Byron was in close touch with the Italian patriots and assisted them in an uprising against the Austrian rule. He also kept a close contact with Shelley until the latter's tragic death in 1822. Byron wrote the verse dramas Cain and the narrative poem The Island in 1821. He published, in 1822, one of the greatest political satires, The Vision of Judgment, with its main attack on Southey, the Tory Poet Laureate. Don Juan, a mock epic in 16 cantos, was finished in 1823.

At the news of the Greek revolt against the Turks, Byron not only gave the insurgent Greeks financial help but plunged himself into the struggle for the national independence of that country. In July 1823, Byron joined the Greek insurgents at Missolonghi. The Greeks made him commander in chief of their forces in January 1824. Because of several months’ hard work under bad weather, Byron fell ill and died. The whole Greek nation mourned over his death.

On the whole, Byron's poetry is one of experience. His heroes are more or less surrogates of himself. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage is such an example. The poem is about a gloomy, passionate young wanderer who escaped from the society he disliked and traveled around the continent, questing for freedom. It teems with all kinds of recognizable features of Romantic poetry -- the medieval, the outcast figure, love of nature, hatred of tyranny, occupation with the remote and savage, and so on. It also contains many vivid and exotic descriptive passages on mountains, rivers, and seas. With his strong passion for liberty and his intense hatred for all tyrants, Byron shows his sympathy for the opssed Portuguese under French occupation; he gives his strong support to the Spanish people fighting for their national independence; he laments over the fallen Greece, exssing his ardent wish that the supssed Greek people should win their freedom; he glorifies the French Revolution and condemns the despotic Napoleon period; and he appeals for the liberty of the opssed nations, while exalting the great fighters for freedom in history.

Don Juan is Byron's masterpiece, a great comic epic of the early 19th century. It is a poem' based on a traditional Spanish legend of a great lover and seducer of women. In the conventional sense, Juan is immoral, yet Byron takes this poem as the most moral. He once wrote to his friend like this: "As to 'Don Juan'..., it may be profligate, but is it not life?" And Byron invests in Juan the moral positives like courage, generosity and frankness, which, according to Byron, are virtues neglected by the modern society. In addition, Though Don Juan is the central figure and all the threads of the story are woven around him, he and his adventures only provide the framework; the poet's true intention is, by making use of Juan's adventures, to sent a panoramic view of different types of society. The opening canto of Don Juan is a brilliant, vivid analysis of romantic passion and of the youthful ardor that over-idealizes it. In describing the siege of Ismail, the central cantos of the poem are remarkable. Here, with an impartiality, Byron reveals the barbarity and blood-lust of war, the incompetence of the generals who conduct it, and the rapaciousness of the rulers who urge it. In the last cantos of the work, Byron's indignation at the self-serving cant of the English aristocracy is supported by a subtle social awareness and a narrative skill which verges on the verse novel.

Byron puts into Don Juan his rich knowledge of the world and the wisdom gained from experience. It sents brilliant pictures of life in its various stages of love, joy, suffering, hatred and fear. The unifying principle in Don Juan is the basic ironic theme of appearance and reality, i.e. what things seem to be and what they actually are. Byron's satire on the English society in the later part of the poem can be compared with Pope's; and his satire is much less personal than that of Pope's, for Byron is here attacking not a personal enemy but the whole hypocritical society. And the spanerse materials and the clash of emotions gathered in the poem are harmonized by Byron's insight into the difference between life's appearance and its actuality.

As a leading Romanticist, Byron’s chief contribution is his creation of the "Byronic hero," a proud, mysterious rebel figure of noble origin. With immense superiority in his passions and powers, this Byronic hero would carry on his shoulders the burden of righting all the wrongs in a corrupt society, and would rise single-handedly against any kind of tyrannical rules either in government, in religion, or in moral principles with unconquerable wills and inexhaustible energies. The conflict is usually one of rebellious inspaniduals against outworn social systems and conventions. Such a hero appears first in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, and then further developed in later works such as the Oriented Tales, Manfred, and Don Juan in different guises. The figure is, to some extent, modeled on the life and personality of Byron himself, and makes Byron famous both at home and abroad.

Byron's poetry, though much criticized by some critics on moral grounds, was immensely popular at home, and also abroad, where it exerted great influence on the Romantic movement. This popularity it owed to the author's persistent attacks on "cant political, religious, and moral," to the novelty of his oriental scenery, to the romantic character of the Byronic hero, and to the easy, fluent,and natural beauty of his verse. Byron's diction, though unequal and frequently faulty, has on the whole a freedom, copiousness and vigor. His descriptions are simple and fresh, and often bring vivid objects before the reader. Byron's poetry is like the oratory which hurries the hearers without applause. The glowing imagination of the poet rises and sinks with the tones of his enthusiasm, roughing into argument, or softening into the melody feeling and sentiments. Byron employed the Ottva Rima (Octave Stanza) from Italian mockheroic poetry. His first experiment was made in Beppo. It was perfected in Don Juan in which the convention flows with ease and naturalness, as Colonel Stanhope described: "a stream sometimes smooth, sometimes rapid and sometimes rushing down in cataracts -- a mixture of philosophy and slang -- of everything."

However, for a long time there existed two controversial opinions on Byron: he was regarded in England as the perverted man, the satanic poet; while on the Continent, he was hailed as the champion of liberty, poet of the people. Because of the English judice, Byron was refused to be buried with his poetic peers when he died. Only in 1969 was this judice against Byron finally overcome by the British critical circle. A white marble-floor memorial to Lord Byron was set up in Westminster Abbey. Thus, his name was put among those of famous poets in the "Poets' Corner." Byron's poetry has great influence on the literature of the whole world. Across Europe, patriots and painters and musicians are all inspired by him. Poets and novelists are profoundly influenced by his work. Actually Byron has enriched European poetry with an abundance of ideas, images, artistic forms and innovations. He stands with Shakespeare and Scott among the British writers who exert the greatest influence over the mainland of Europe.

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