BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
The English poet George Gordon Noel Byron, 6th Baron
Byron (1788-1824), was one of the most important figures of the romantic
movement. Because of his works, active life, and physical beauty he came to be
considered the personification of the romantic poet-hero.
George Gordon
Noel Byron was born on Jan. 22, 1788, into a family of fast-decaying nobility.
His lame foot, the absence of any fatherly authority in the household after
Captain "Mad Jack" Byron's death in 1791, the contempt of his aristocratic
relatives for the impoverished widow and her son, his Calvinistic up-bringing at
the hands of a Scottish nurse, the fickleness and stupidity of his mother--all
conspired to hurt the pride and sensitiveness of the boy. This roused in him a
need for self-assertion which he soon sought to gratify in three main
directions: love, poetry, and action.
On the death of his granduncle in
1798, Byron inherited the title and estate. After 4 years at Harrow (1801-1805),
he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he became conscious for the first
time of the discrepancy between the lofty aspirations of idealism and the petty
realities of experience. "I took my gradations in the vices with great
promptitude," he later reminisced, "but they were not to my taste." His
obstinate quest for some genuine passion among the frail women of this world
accounts for the crowded catalog of his amours.
Early Works
In
1807 Byron's juvenilia were collected under the title Hours of
Idleness; although the little book exhibited only the milder forms of
romantic Weltschmerz, it was harshly criticized by the Edinburgh
Review. The irate author counterattacked in English Bards and Scotch
Reviewers (1809), the first manifestation of a gift for satire and a
sarcastic wit which single him out among the major English romantics, and which
he may have owed to his aristocratic outlook and his classical
education.
In 1809 a 2-year trip to the Mediterranean countries provided
material for the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Their
publication in 1812 earned Byron instant glory, as they combined the more
popular features of the late-18th-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,
somberly mysterious, yet strongly impassioned for all his weariness with
life.
Social Life
While his fame was spreading, Byron was busy
shocking London high society. After his affairs with Lady Caroline Lamb and Lady
Oxford, his incestuous and adulterous love for his half sister Augusta not only
made him a reprobate, but also crystallized the sense of guilt and doom to which
he had always been prone. From then on, the theme of incest was to figure
prominently in his writings, starting with the epic tales that he published
between 1812 and 1816: The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair, Lara,
The Siege of Corinth, and Parisina. Incestuous love, criminal
although genuine and irresistible, was a suitable metaphor for the tragic
condition of man, who is cursed by God, rebuked by society, and hated by himself
because of sins for which he is not responsible. The tales, therefore, add a new
dimension of depth to the Byronic hero: in his total alienation he now actively
assumes the tragic fatality which turns natural instinct into unforgivable sin,
and he deliberately takes his rebellious stance as an outcast against all
accepted notions of the right order of things.
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While thus seeking relief in imaginative exploration of his own tortured mind,
Byron had been half hoping to find peace and reconciliation in a more settled
life. But his marriage to Anna Isabella Milbanke (Jan. 1, 1815) soon proved a
complete failure, and she left him after a year. London society could have
ignored the peculiarities of Byron's private life, but a satire against the
Prince Regent, "Stanzas to a Lady Weeping," which he had appended to The
Corsair, aroused hysterical abuse from the Tories, in whose hands his
separation from his wife became an efficient weapon. On April 25, 1816, Byron
had to leave his native country, never to return.
His Travels
In
Switzerland, Byron spent several months in the company of the poet Shelley,
resuming an agitated and unenthusiastic affair with the latter's sister-in-law,
Clare Clairmont. Under Shelley's influence he read Wordsworth and imbibed the
high-flown but uncongenial spirituality which permeates the third canto of
Childe Harold. But The Prisoner of Chillon and Byron's first
drama, Manfred, took the Byronic hero to a new level of inwardness: his
greatness now lies in the steadfast refusal to bow to the hostile powers that
oppress him, whether he discovers new selfhood in his very dereliction or seeks
in self-destruction the fulfillment of his assertiveness.
In October 1816
Byron left for Italy and settled in Venice, where he spent many days and nights
in unprecedented debauchery. His compositions of 1817, however, show signs of a
new outlook. The fourth canto of Childe Harold does not reject the
cosmic pessimism of Manfred, but the mood of shrill revolt is
superseded by a tone of resigned acceptance, and sizable sections of the poem
are devoted to the theme of political freedom and national independence. Equally
significant of Byron's renewed ability to face the world in laughter rather than
in anger is the witty, good-humored satire of Beppo, which should be
considered a preparation for Don Juan, begun in September
1818.
Spontaneous maturation had thus paved the way for the healing
influence of Teresa Guiccioli, Byron's last love, whom he met in April 1819. The
poet had at last begun to come to terms with his desperate conception of life,
to the extent of being able to debunk all shams and to parody all posturing,
including his own, in Don Juan, the unfinished masterpiece on which he
was to work till the end of his life. But this new balance also found serious
utterance in Cain, the best of the plays that he wrote in 1821. It is a closely
argued dramatic restatement of Byron's lasting creed that as the universe is
swayed by a loveless God, the only greatness to which man can aspire lies in his
foredoomed struggle for reason and justice. Marino Faliero illustrates
the same pattern in the field of action, exalting the selflessness of the man
who sacrifices his life in the service of popular freedom.
It is
characteristic of Byron's integrity that he increasingly sought to translate his
ideas into action, repeatedly voicing the more radical Whig viewpoint in the
House of Lords in 1812-1813, running real risks to help the Italian Carbonari in
1820-1821, and collaborating with Leigh Hunt in launching the Liberal
in 1822. His early poetry had contributed to sensitizing the European mind
to the plight of Greece under the Turkish yoke. In 1824 Byron joined the Greek
liberation fighters at Missolonghi, where he died of malarial fever on April
19.
FURTHER READINGS
While Byron's tumultuous life has inspired
many biographers, the standard work is Leslie A. Marchand, Byron: A
Biography (3 vols., 1957). Byron's intriguing personality and his ambiguous
ideological position are discussed in William J. Calvert, Byron: Romantic
Paradox (1935); Edward Wayne Marjarum, Byron as Skeptic and
Believer (1938); Ernest J. Lovell, Byron, the Record of a Quest:
Studies in a Poet's Concept and Treatment of Nature (1949); and G. Wilson
Knight, Lord Byron: Christian Virtues (1953).
General critical
introductions are Herbert E. Read, Byron (1951); Paul West, Byron
and the Spoiler's Art (1960); Paul West, ed., Byron: A Collection of
Critical Essays (1963); Leslie A. Marchand, Byron's Poetry: A Critical
Introduction (1965); and W. Paul Elledge, Byron and the Dynamics of
Metaphor (1968).
No full-scale study of Byron's drama has appeared
since Samuel C. Chew, The Dramas of Lord Byron (1915). However, much
attention has been devoted to Don Juan, especially by Paul Graham
Trueblood in The Flowering of Byron's Genius: Studies in Byron's Don
Juan (1945) and by Elizabeth French Boyd in Byron's Don Juan: A
Critical Study (1945).
For Byron's influence, William Ellery
Leonard, Byron and Byronism in America (1905), and Samuel C. Chew,
Byron in England: His Fame and After-Fame (1924), have not been
superseded. For general background information see Ian R. J. Jack, English
Literature: 1815-1832 (1963).
criticism: Introduction to George Gordon Noel Byron -- BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY /乔治·戈登·拜伦传记
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