Lord Byron (1788–1824)

“Mad, bad, dangerous to know.” These words bring to mind any of the dark, inscrutable characters of 19th-century English literature, whether Lord Darcy, Heathcliff, or their spiritual heirs in the Twilight franchise. However, the phrase was first coined to describe a real literary figure, not a fictional character, George Gordon, Lord Byron.

This book offers a generous selection of Byron’s poetry, journals, and a few letters. It opens with a biographical essay by editor Peter Quennell. show more Despite its 700 pages, the book fits easily in a coat pocket and has a soft but durable binding.

Until now, I’d only encountered Byron in Palgrave’s Golden Treasury or other anthologies, where apart from the exquisite “So We’ll Go No More A-Roving” and the nearly as good “She Walks in Beauty,” I wasn’t impressed. But in longer works, such as “Childe Harold” or “Don Juan,” Byron comes into his own. I particularly liked the latter, represented here by its first four cantos, in which gripping narratives that describe a perilous sea voyage or the love and downfall of Haidee and Juan are interrupted with savagely witty digressions and comical metatext. One of these days, I hope to read the rest of this massive poem.

When Byron’s diction is set next to that of contemporaries such as Shelley or Keats, it seems plainer and more straightforward. This works to his advantage in the long narrative poems. Two centuries on, he sounds more modern, and I rarely needed to consult a dictionary or lexicon of mythology, as I do with Shelley, for instance.

My appreciation of Byron increased with the prose works reprinted here, revealing a contradictory character, by turns sullen and rueful, then playful. Perhaps it was all a pose—the reluctant celebrity who prefers to dine “in solitude, where we are least alone”—but it suits him well. For biographer Quennell, there is no doubt: Byron created the persona and then was trapped in it. show less

For a long time, I somehow placed Byron into that terrible category of "people you read about" - I don't know why, because every time I've looked up quotations from Don Juan I've felt that this is a poem I should read. Probably needless to say that I couldn't tear myself away from it once I did finally get around to reading it, and read the whole thing in one weekend.

There's a story, of sorts, although that gets pushed further and further into the background as we go on; there's sex and show more violence; there are all your favourite holiday destinations (Spain, Greece, Turkey, English country houses); there are the wonderfully cutting asides about fellow-poets and contemporary politics; there are gloriously random discussions of whatever happens to come into the poet's head.

It's all wonderful, but what really makes it work is Byron's amazingly light touch with verse. The ottava rima form ought by rights to sound forced and mechanical in English, and it probably would in anyone else's hands, but Byron seems to be able to make it read as naturally as everyday conversation. Of course, he has to cheat like anything to achieve this, but he knows exactly how far he can bend the rules before the whole thing breaks down, and always draws back just in time. He seems to take great pleasure in pretending to paint himself into a corner and then producing a ludicrously inappropriate or impossible rhyme ("Aristotle/bottle", "Corydon/horrid one", "excel/well/indispensable"). Even a master of atrocious rhymes like W.S. Gilbert ("Plato/potato") couldn't have done any better - in fact, Gilbert clearly lifted a few useful examples direct from Don Juan, e.g. the "monotony/got any" in Iolanthe. And there are some wonderful bits of bathos, like "...that all-softening, overpowering knell, / The tocsin of the soul—the dinner-bell" and some dreadfully barbed jokes "...angling, too, that solitary vice, / Whatever Izaak Walton sings or says". What more could you want? show less

Bloody great book. I think a lot of people don't realize that as a poet/writer Byron was in a sense closer to 18th century satirists like, say, Swift than he was to his Romantic so-called cohorts ... and yet he's often considered some kind of "arch"-Romantic. Naah. His great talent, I'd say, was a comic one, and it's in Don Juan -- even unfinished as it is -- that this comic genius burns most brightly. It isn't just the funny-as-hell "Hudibrastic" rhymes he often employs, it's ... oh, hell, show more he was just such a funny damned bastard. Mean, spiteful, but funny. show less

This 1995 Penguin edition is a real bargain. There is substantial critical apparatus, by leading scholars Susan J Wolfson (who is as good on Byron as she is on Keats) and Peter J Manning, always interesting and illuminating. The selections to my taste are perfectly judged - quite important in a ’Selected Poems’ :). (There is nothing from 'Don Juan'. I think this is defensible because it is notoriously hard to anthologise and Penguin do also offer a similarly bargain priced edition.) And show more the poems are presented pretty much as they were published. So in particular it is fascinating to see the volume punctuated by the Cantos of ‘Childe Harold's Pilgrimage’. It’s really difficult to imagine this being better done. show less