George Gordon, Lord Byron

George Gordon, Lord Byron

Together with Shelley and Keats, George Gordon Byron (1788-l824) is a representative of the second generation of English romantic poets. His was the life of the Romantic par excellence, as he was an aristocrat, a prolific and successful poet, but misunderstood by others, he liked to be considered a debauchee, even spreading false rumours about his life style, and he died heroically hting for Greek independence. He can be considered romantic also in the features of his poetic, e.g. because of his tendency to titanism (i.e. exaggeration of powerful feelings), and individualism (identification and self-personalisation with his main characters); also, he felt melancholic, both seeing the evident difference between reality and dream world and trusting Calvinistic design of human predestination, thinking he was thus bound to a sinful and condemned by others life. He was also interested in history, and especially in fallen empires and past ages in general, i.e. once more in images of decay and death; moreover, he had a strong nationalistic spirit, as he took part first in the Carbonari revolt against Austrian domination in Ravenna and then in the Greek national ht against Ottoman domination.

Although Wordsworth and Coleridge too are considered romantics, Byron has a different idea of Nature, as it is seen by him as a reflection of his own mood, of his motus animi: because of this he prefers strong and even violent images of weather phenomena such as tempests, storms, procellous seas, high mountain ridges and so forth. He also showed a taste for Gothicism (The Prisoner of Chillon) and exoticism (Oriental Tales), typical romantic characteristics, together with a sense of restlessness, i.e. the urge of travelling (both compulsorily and voluntarily) throughout all Europe, as he visited, during his short life, Portugal, Spain, France, Switzerland, Albania, Turkey, Italy and, at last, Greece.

Not secondly, then, we must consider among the romantic elements of Byron's poetry the realization of the so-called "Byronic hero", i.e. the creation of characters with similar features, derived mainly from Milton's Satan in Paradise Lost and, secondly, from Byron's own personality (both real and self-made). Byronic hero is a dark and mysterious man, often pensive and brooding, full of blameworthy secrets of the past, but provided with bravery and eventually redeemed by his love for a woman. There is in this, beyond a recall to John Milton, also a reminiscence of Shakespearean hero, but with a substantial difference: while in Shakespeare's plays the hero is punished for what he (or she) has committed (let's think, for instance, of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth), in Byron's poems he is won by fatal doom and weird destiny, which cannot be controlled (a clearly visible link with the Calvinistic Grace of God theory, and thus once more a sense of closeness to Byron's own experience of life).

Apart from this, some critics speak of "Augustan Byron", i.e. of another aspect of his poetry, devoted also to satire, to mock-heroic poem, and to naked truth of things. His critical and satirical attitude is evident in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (in satirical couplets, legacy of the admiration for Pope), written to respond to the attack launched by "The Edinburgh Review", in which he ridicules and denounces the very best poets of the day furiously but uncritically. His sense of fun and deflation of romantic ideals can distinctly be found in his ottava rima poems, rich in mock-heroic situations and burlesque circumstances (all this was certainly in part drew from Pulci's Morgante Maggiore and Casti's works, which he had occasion to discover during his sojourn in Italy): The Vision of Judgement and Don Juan are the representative works of his Augustan facet.

The first was once more written to respond to a critic: Southey's attack in the almost homonymous poem A Vision of Judgement, in which he emphatically described the death of king George III and accused evidently Byron's Don Juan, defining it as a monstrous combination of horror and mockery, lewdness and impiety, which had polluted English poetry. On the other hand, Byron replied describing apertis verbis the lack of inspiration, the insipidity, the poor style and the hypocrisy of Southey (let's just have a look to the incipit: "If Mr. Southey had not rushed in where he had no business, and where he never was before, and never will be again, the following poem [i.e. The Vision of Judgement] would not have been written.  It is not impossible that it may be as good as his own, seeing that it cannot, by any species of stupidity, natural or acquired, be worse.  The gross flattery, the dull impudence, the renegado intolerance, and impious cant, of the poem by the author of 'Wat Tyler', are something so stupendous as to form the sublime of himself - containing the quintessence of his own attributes."), describing an imaginative Heaven with gates and St. Peter's keys rusty for not being used, and angels husky for singing all the time, as they do not have anything else to do, then proceeding with grotesque, both social and political satire, and many other humorous scenes.

Don Juan, which is considered Byron's masterpiece, deals apparently with the themes of love and youth, but once more the true targets are concretely the hypocrisies of the time, false sentimentalism, marriage conventions, the more displayed than obeyed morality and the pervasive corruption of politics in the Country. In this work the nexus with Laurence Sterne and mostly Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's travels is quite evident. No surprise that the poem was generally considered "too free" for the time, and condemned by narrow and petty society. Accuses of trifle and even of immorality were launched, but on the other side some influent ures of the time, mainly literates, appreciated Byron's poem: among them there was Percy Bysshe Shelley, who asserted Don Juan was "wholly new and relative to the age, and yet  unsurpassably beautiful".

Byron was the only romantic English poet capable to acquire an European influence, as non-Byronic authors could hardly be found in the first half of the XIX century, as quite everyone refused the political establishment of the time, aspired to personal fulfilment, and loved liberty over any other thing like Byron did. Even Goethe hailed him as a true personality in literature, but eminence in the Continent was deeply in contrast with his reception in Motherland: in England fame, long before Byron's death, had mutated to infamy. It's not a secret that gossip sheets sizzled with lurid tales of homoeroticism, pederasty, adultery, and an incestuous liaison with his half-sister, Augusta. His vices have certainly been aggravated by indoctrination to Calvinism, from which he drew omens of final punishment because of a life felt like a "gloomy tragedy set in a moral torture chamber", using Mario Praz's expression. Stating from this base we can now better understand the Augustan aspect of Byron, as when he could escape from the religious undertow of Calvinism, he wrote like an enlightenment rationalistic, almost with another mind.