Stephen Minta

Stephen Minta has put together in one book a history, a historiography, a biography, Byron's poetry, and a travelogue in a most satisfactory manner. Minta carefully follows not only Byron's footsteps in Greece but the many interested parties who came with and after him. Published in 1998 this had to be a refreshingly new scholarship. Considering this included many serious hikes on foot. It is not outlandish to say Minta walked the walk.

Quotes: (page 173) “In a letter of August 1811, Byron show more wrote: 'At three and twenty I am left alone....It is true, I am young enough to begin again, but with whom can I retrace the laughing part of life?' Early in the same month, Hobhouse had written to him saying: 'I can not bear to read such melancholy letters from you....' While in a letter of early January 1814, Hobhouse refers at length to a rumor that Byron had committed suicide.

In the midst of the evaporation of the laughing part of life, the personal tragedies, the lack of direction, Bron had nowhere to turn. There was no refuge for him in orthodox faith. To a friend who was nagging anxiously after the salvation of his soul, he wrote: 'There is something Pagan in me that I cannot shake off....I deny nothing, but doubt everything.'”

(page 191) “What he calls 'mobility', a word he defines in the notes to Don Juan as 'an excessive susceptibility o immediate impressions,' is a painful attribute. Those who are emotionally mobile never move on, never lose touch with the past. On the contrary, they relive it through every shift in sentiment, every new attachment. Versatility, the ability to go on feeling but without the ability to forget, is the Byronic nightmare.”

(page 208) “No heroism, no climax, no meaningful end. Yet it would be perverse to wonder through Mesolongi today and pretend nothing had ever happened here. In the Garden of Heroes, on the northern edge of town, Byron's statue appears as natural as the palm trees that surround it, more naturally certainly than either would in England. So there is a problem for the biographer of Byron's last days. Two stories, apparently irreconcilable; one of drab decline, the other of unforgettable sacrifice.”

(page 282) “By all the old rules he should have abandoned the Greek cause, for want of political ballast. But he did not; and there is no reason to think Stanhope was wrong when he said he would he would have never given up, even had he lived. Byron's approach, so often derided, resists abstraction. It is a commitment to the here and now of the world, problematic and elusive.” show less