POET

Lord Byron (George Gordon) (1788 - 1824)

BIOGRAPHY

The most flamboyant and notorious of the major Romantics, George Gordon, Lord Byron, was likewise the most fashionable poet of the day. He created an immensely popular Romantic hero—defiant, melancholy, haunted by secret guilt—for which, to many, he seemed the model. He is also a Romantic paradox: a leader of the era's poetic revolution, he named Alexander Pope as his master; a worshiper of the ideal, he never lost touch with reality; a deist and freethinker, he retained from his youth a Calvinist sense of original sin; a peer of the realm, he championed liberty in his works and deeds, giving money, time, energy, and finally his life to the Greek war of independence. His faceted personality found expression in satire, verse narrative, ode, lyric, speculative drama, historical tragedy, confessional poetry, dramatic monologue, seriocomic epic, and voluminous correspondence, written in Spenserian stanzas, heroic couplets, blank verse, terza rima, ottava rima, and vigorous prose. In his dynamism, sexuality, self-revelation, and demands for freedom for oppressed people everywhere, Byron captivated the Western mind and heart as few writers have, stamping upon nineteenth-century letters, arts, politics, even clothing styles, his image and name as the embodiment of Romanticism.

George Gordon Noel Byron was born, with a clubbed right foot, in London on 22 January 1788, the son of Catherine Gordon of Gight, an impoverished Scots heiress, and Captain John ("Mad Jack") Byron, a fortune-hunting widower with a daughter, Augusta. The profligate captain squandered his wife's inheritance, was absent for the birth of his only son, and eventually decamped for France, an exile from English creditors, where he died in 1791 at thirty-six, the mortal age for both the poet and his daughter Ada.

In the summer of 1789 Byron moved with his mother to Aberdeen. (His half sister had earlier been sent to her maternal grandmother.) Emotionally unstable, Catherine Byron raised her son in an atmosphere variously colored by her excessive tenderness, fierce temper, insensitivity, and pride. She was as likely to mock his lameness as to consult doctors about its correction. From his Presbyterian nurse Byron developed a lifelong love for the Bible and an abiding fascination with the Calvinist doctrines of innate evil and predestined salvation. Early schooling instilled a devotion to reading and especially a "grand passion" for history that informed much of his later writing.

With the death in 1798 of his great-uncle, the "Wicked" fifth Lord Byron, George became the sixth Baron Byron of Rochdale, heir to Newstead Abbey, the family seat in Nottinghamshire. He enjoyed the role of landed nobleman, proud of his coat of arms with its mermaid and chestnut horses surmounting the motto "Crede Byron" ("Trust Byron").

An "ebullition of passion" for his cousin Margaret Parker in 1800 inspired his "first dash into poetry." When she died two years later, he composed "On the Death of a Young Lady"; throughout his life poetic expression would serve him as a catharsis of strong emotion.

At Harrow (1801-1805), he excelled in oratory, wrote verse, and played sports, even cricket. (After a quack doctor subjected him to painful, futile treatments for his foot, London specialists prescribed a corrective boot, later fitted with a brace, which the patient often refused to wear.) He also formed the first of those passionate attachments with other, chiefly younger, boys that he would enjoy throughout his life; before reaching his teen years he had been sexually initiated by his maid. There can be little doubt that he had strong bisexual tendencies, though relationships with women seem generally, but not always, to have satisfied his emotional needs more fully.

In the summer of 1803 he fell so deeply in love with his distant cousin, the beautiful-and engaged-Mary Chaworth of Annesley Hall, that he interrupted his education for a term to be near her. His unrequited passion found expression in such poems as "Hills of Annesley" (written 1805), "The Adieu" (written 1807), "Stanzas to a Lady on Leaving England" (written 1809), and "The Dream" (written 1816). Years later he told Thomas Medwin that all his "fables about the celestial nature of women" originated from "the perfection" his imagination created in Mary Chaworth.

Early in 1804 he began an intimate correspondence with his half sister, Augusta, five years his senior. He asked that she consider him "not only as a Brother" but as her "warmest and most affectionate Friend." As he grew apart from his coarse, often violent, mother, he drew closer to Augusta.

Byron attended Trinity College, Cambridge, intermittently from October 1805 until July 1808, when he received an M.A. degree. During "the most romantic period of [his] life," he experienced a "violent, though pure, love and passion" for John Edleston, a choirboy at Trinity two years younger than he. Intellectual pursuits interested him less than such London diversions as fencing and boxing lessons, the theater, demimondes, and gambling. Living extravagantly, he began to amass the debts that would bedevil him for years. In Southwell, where his mother had moved in 1803, he prepared his verses for publication.

In November 1806 he distributed around Southwell his first book of poetry. Fugitive Pieces, printed at his expense and anonymously, collects the poems inspired by his early infatuations, friendships, and experiences at Harrow, Cambridge, and elsewhere. When his literary adviser, the Reverend John Thomas Becher, a local minister, objected to the frank eroticism of certain lines, Byron suppressed the volume. A revised and expurgated selection of verses appeared in January 1807 as Poems on Various Occasions, in an edition of one hundred copies, also printed privately and anonymously. An augmented collection, Hours of Idleness, "By George Gordon, Lord Byron, A Minor," was published in June. The new poems in this first public volume of his poetry are little more than schoolboy translations from the classics and imitations of such pre-Romantics as Thomas Gray, Thomas Chatterton, Robert Burns, and James Macpherson's Ossian, and of contemporaries including Walter Scott and Thomas Moore. Missing were the original flashes of eroticism and satire that had enlivened poems in the private editions that were omitted from Hours of Idleness. The work has value for what it reveals about the youthful poet's influences, interests, talent, and direction. In "On a Change of Masters at a Great Public School," he employs heroic couplets for satiric effect in the manner--if without the polish--of Alexander Pope, a model for Byron throughout his career. In obviously autobiographical poems Byron experiments with personae, compounded of his true self and of fictive elements, which both disclose and disguise him. Groups of verses on a single subject show his understanding of the effectiveness of multiple points of view. He continued to refine these techniques in works from Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and the Oriental tales through the dramas to Don Juan.

The imitativeness and sentimentality in Hours of Idleness were not excused by a preface that, with pompous mock modesty, pleaded the poet's youth and inexperience, while disclaiming any intention of his undertaking a poetic career. A second edition, on Byron's instructions retitled Poems Original and Translated, appeared in 1808; the contents had been altered slightly and the preface omitted.

It was as a published poet that Byron returned to Cambridge in June 1807. Besides renewing acquaintances, he formed an enduring friendship with John Cam Hobhouse--his beloved "Hobby." Inclined to liberalism in politics, Byron joined Hobhouse in the Cambridge Whig Club.

In February 1808 the influential Whig journal the Edinburgh Review, published anonymously (in an issue dated January 1808) Henry Brougham's notice of Hours of Idleness, which combined justifiable criticism of the book with unwarranted personal assaults on the author. The scornfully worded review had a beneficial effect. Stung and infuriated, Byron set aside mawkish, derivative, occasional verse and began avenging himself through satire, expanding his poetic commentary on present-day "British Bards," started the previous year, to include a counterblast against "Scotch Reviewers."

In March 1809, two months after attaining his majority, he took his seat in the House of Lords; seven times that spring he attended sessions of Parliament.

Shortly thereafter, Byron's first major poetic work, English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers. A Satire, was published anonymously in an edition of one thousand copies. Inspired by the Dunciad (1728, 1742) of his idol, Pope, and modeled largely on William Gifford's Baviad (1791) and Maeviad (1795), the poem, in heroic couplets, takes indiscriminate aim at most of the poets and playwrights of the moment, notably Walter Scott, Robert Southey, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, sparing only Gifford, Samuel Rogers, and Thomas Campbell, who deferred to Pope, along with dramatists George Colman the Younger, Richard Cumberland, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan. His main target is the critics. From these "harpies that must be fed" he singles out for condemnation "immortal" Francis Jeffrey, whom he mistakenly assumed had written the offending comments on Hours of Idleness in the Edinburgh Review.

The satire created a stir and found general favor with the reviewers. The Gentleman's Magazine (March 1809) praised the poem as "unquestionably an original work," replete with a "mingled genius, good sense, and spirited animadversion" unseen in many years. By May English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers had gone into a second, revised and enlarged edition in which Byron abandoned his anonymity. Third and fourth editions followed in 1810. He suppressed a fifth edition in 1812, as he had come to know and respect some of his victims and to regret many of his critical and personal jabs.

The overall aim, as stated in the preface, is "to make others write better." Of the major Romantic poets, Byron most sympathized with neoclassicism, with its order, discipline, and clarity. The importance of English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers lies not only in its vigor and vitality but in Byron's lively advocacy of the neoclassical virtues found in such seventeenth- and eighteenth-century poets as Dryden and Pope, and, from his own day, in Gifford. His admiration for Pope never wavered, nor did he ever totally abandon the heroic couplet and Augustan role of censor and moralist, as seen in Hints from Horace (written 1811), The Curse of Minerva (written 1811), and The Age of Bronze (written 1822-1823).

Feeling revenged on the reviewers, Byron was anxious to realize a long-held dream of traveling abroad. Though in debt, he gathered together sufficient resources to allow him to begin a tour of the eastern Mediterranean. On 2 July 1809 he sailed from England on the Lisbon packet, accompanied by Hobhouse and three servants, including William Fletcher, who remained as valet until Byron's death, and Robert Rushton, the "little page" of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto I. Their route took them from Lisbon on horseback across Spain, the scene of Wellington's Peninsular Campaign and of Spanish partisans' resistance to the French. Once in Greece, Byron and Hobhouse pushed by boat and horseback into virtually unvisited Albania; in Jannina, Byron bought several magnificent native costumes (in one of which Thomas Phillips painted him in 1814). In Tepelene they were entertained by Ali Pasha, effective ruler, with his son Veli, of Albania and western Greece as far south as the Peloponnesus. Ruthless, sophisticated, and sensuous, the "Lion of Ioannina" represented the type of romantic villain Byron later drew in his Oriental tales and in the character of Lambro, Haidée's "piratical papa" in Don Juan (Canto III).

Anxious to set down the myriad experiences the trip afforded him, Byron began an autobiographical poem in Jannina on 31 October 1809, wherein he recorded the adventures and reflections of Childe Burun (a combination of the archaic title for a youth of noble birth and an ancient form of his own surname); he subsequently renamed the hero Harold. The Spenserian stanza in which he cast his impressions no doubt derived from his readings in Edmund Spencer's Faerie Queene (1590, 1596) reprinted in an anthology he had carried to Albania. Byron completed the first canto in Athens at the end of the year.

Turning southward, he and Hobhouse journeyed through fateful Missolonghi and rode into Athens on Christmas night 1809. They lodged at the foot of the Acropolis with Mrs. Tarsia Macri, widow of a Greek who had been British vice consul. Byron soon fell in love with her three daughters, all under the age of fifteen, but especially with Theresa, only twelve, his "Maid of Athens."

Near the end of English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers, Byron had scoffed at Thomas Bruce, Earl of Elgin's waste of money on the "Phidian freaks, / Mis-shapen monuments and maimed antiques" he was removing from the Acropolis and shipping to England. Now, the Parthenon and other ruins of Greece's golden age, everywhere to be seen, increasingly filled Byron with sorrow, while the despoilation of the country's treasures and its people's enslavement by the Turks fueled his indignation. His anger at the ignoble Elgin would flash forth in Childe Harold (Canto II) and in The Curse of Minerva. Excursions in January 1810 to Cape Sounion, overlooking the green islands of the Cyclades, and to Marathon, where the Athenians defeated the invading Persians in 490 B.C., reinforced for him the appalling contrast between the glory and might of ancient Greece and its contemporary disgrace under Turkish domination. He movingly evoked these scenes and sentiments a decade later in the often-quoted stanzas on "The Isles of Greece" and on Marathon in Don Juan (Canto III).

In March 1810 Byron and Hobhouse extended their tour into Turkey. On 28 March, in Smyrna, he completed the second canto of Childe Harold, incorporating his adventures in Albania and his thoughts on Greece. He visited the plain of Troy and on 3 May, while Hobhouse read Ovid's Hero and Leander, imitated Leander's feat of swimming the Hellespont; within a week, lines "Written After Swimming from Sestos to Abydos" commemorated his pride in this exploit. During the two months he spent in Constantinople amid Oriental splendor, filth, and cruelty, his distaste for the Turks grew. In July he parted with Hobhouse, who was bound for England, and traveled back to Athens, where he settled in the Capuchin monastery below the Acropolis. Here, he studied Italian and modern Greek, just as he would learn Armenian from monks in Venice six years later. He also moved easily in the cosmopolitan society of Athens.

Stirred to literary composition, he first produced explanatory notes for Childe Harold; then, in February and March 1811, he wrote two poems in heroic couplets. Hints from Horace, an inferior sequel to English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers, satirizes contemporary poetry and drama, while praising Dryden, Pope, Swift, and Butler. The Curse of Minerva, in its attack on Lord Elgin for pillaging Greece's heritage, records for the first time the full extent of Byron's sympathy for classical Greek culture as well as for modern Greece and her people.

When he sailed for England in April 1811, he traveled for a time aboard the transport ship Hydra, which also carried the last large shipments of Lord Elgin's marbles. He arrived at Sheerness, Kent, on 14 July, two years and twelve days after his departure. To Augusta he wrote on 9 September that he had probably acquired nothing by his travels but "a smattering of two languages & a habit of chewing Tobacco," but this claim was disingenuous. "If I am a poet," he mused, "... the air of Greece has made me one." He had accumulated source material for any number of works. More, exposure to all manner of persons, behavior, government, and thought had transformed him into a citizen of the world, with broadened political opinions and a clear-sighted view of prejudice and hypocrisy in the "tight little island" of England. Significantly, he would select as the epigraph for Childe Harold a passage from Le Cosmopolite, ou, le Citoyen du Monde (1753), by Louis Charles Fougeret de Monbron, that, in part, compares the universe to a book of which one has read but the first page if he has seen only his own country.

Within three weeks of his return, Byron was plunged into a period of prolonged mourning. His mother died on 2 August, before he set out for Newstead. Whatever her failings, she had loved her son, taken pride in his accomplishments, and managed Newstead economically in his absence. "I had but one friend in the world," he exclaimed, "and she is gone." News of the deaths of two classmates followed hard upon this sorrow. Then, in October, he learned of the death from consumption that May of John Edleston, the former choirboy at Trinity College. Deeply affected, he lamented his loss in the lines "To Thyrza" (1811), a woman's name concealing the subject's true identity and gender. This was the first of several "Thyrza" poems, among them, "Away, Away, Ye Notes of Woe" (written 1811), "One Struggle More, and I Am Free" (written 1812), and "And Thou Art Dead, As Young and Fair" (written 1812). He also commemorated Edleston in additions to Childe Harold (Canto II).

In January 1812 Byron resumed his seat in the House of Lords, allying himself with the Liberal Whigs represented by Henry Richard Vassall Fox, Lord Holland. During his political career he spoke but three times in the House of Lords, taking unpopular sides. In his maiden speech on 27 February he defended stocking weavers in his home area of Nottinghamshire who had broken the improved weaving machinery, or frames, that deprived them of work and reduced them to near starvation; he opposed as cruel and unjust a government-sponsored bill that made frame breaking a capital offense. On 21 April he made a plea for Catholic emancipation, the most controversial issue of the day. On 1 June he stood to present the petition of Major John Cartwright for the right to petition for the reform of Parliament.

Upon his return to England in July 1811, Byron had given the manuscript of Childe Harold to R.C. Dallas, his adviser in the publication of English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers. Dallas enthusiastically showed the poem to John Murray II, the respected publisher of Scott and Southey, who agreed to publish Byron, beginning a rich association between publisher and poet.

On 10 March 1812 Murray published Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Cantos I and II. Five-hundred quarto copies, priced at thirty shillings each, sold out in three days. An octavo edition of three thousand copies at twelve shillings was on the market within two days. Shortly after Childe Harold appeared, Byron remarked, "I awoke one morning and found myself famous." Murray brought out five editions of the poem in 1812 alone, and published the tenth, and last, separate edition in 1815. In less than six months sales had reached forty-five hundred copies. In the Edinburgh Review (February 1812), Francis Jeffrey commented that Byron had "improved marvellously since his last appearance at our tribunal." While noting Byron's statements of unorthodox political and religious opinions and the poem's "considerable marks of haste and carelessness," Jeffrey cited as the "chief excellence" of Childe Harold "a singular freedom and boldness, both of thought and expression, and a great occasional force and felicity of diction." Byron promptly apologized for his unfair attack on Jeffrey in English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers. In the Quarterly Review (March 1812), George Ellis concluded that the poem exhibited "some marks of carelessness, many of caprice, but many also of sterling genius."

Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Cantos I and II, can with profit be read as Byron's poetic journal of his Mediterranean and Eastern tour in 1809-1811. Color and energy animate descriptions of the familiar (Spain and Portugal), the exotic (Albania and Greece), and the violent (a Spanish bullfight and feuding Albanians). But the international popularity of the work's eventual four cantos (represented in the nineteenth century by partial and complete translations into no fewer than ten languages) derived less from its appeal as a travelogue than from its powerful articulation of the Weltschmerz, or "World-weariness," born of the chaos of the French Revolution and Napoléonic Wars that disrupted all of European society. The poem is the record of the contemporary quest for moral and intellectual certainty and positive self-assertion. The route for many was through sensation and emotional experience.

In Canto I Harold, "sore sick at heart" with his life of "revel and ungodly glee," leaves his native Albion on pilgrimage to find peace and spiritual rebirth. As befits a quest poem, Childe Harold is subtitled A Romaunt, recalling the medieval romances whose knighted heroes go in search of holy objects, and is cast in the stanza and archaic language of Spenser's Faerie Queene. Byron soon abandoned the linguistic pretense for a more modern, if highly literary, style, but he continued to use the Spenserian stanza effectively throughout the poem's four cantos of observation, description, sentiment, and meditation.

In Childe Harold Byron began to blend narration and digression to produce a type of descriptive-meditative poetry which he would use to greater advantage in Don Juan. Scenes Harold and the narrator describe often spur them to moral reflections. Sites associated with the Napoléonic campaign, such as Cintra, Talavera, and Albuera, elicit comments on the follies of war (Canto I); the ruins of Greece evoke thoughts on the evils of tyranny and on the transience of powerful civilizations and "men of might" (Canto II). Byron's sic transit gloria mundi theme--from the Latin maxim translated "Thus passes away the glory of the world"--figures prominently in the remaining cantos of Childe Harold and in Don Juan. The work repeatedly stresses the rich heritage of poetry and liberty which contemporary Europe has received from classical Greece. The country's ancient greatness serves as a standard by which modern Greeks are measured: "Hereditary bondsmen! know ye not / Who would be free themselves must strike the blow? / ... / Greece! change thy lords, thy state is still the same; / Thy glorious day is o'er, but not thine years of shame" (Canto II).

Harold was introduced, Byron wrote in the preface, "for the sake of giving some connexion to the piece." By labeling Harold "a fictitious character" Byron sought to dissociate himself from his protagonist, but his readers, noting many and striking similarities, persisted in equating the artist with his hero. Though he, too, speculated on such a relationship, Walter Scott, reviewing the third canto of Childe Harold and The Prisoner of Chillon, and Other Poems in the Quarterly Review (October 1816), recognized that in Harold Byron had created a new and significant Romantic character type which reappeared in almost all his heroes.

Harold is the first "Byronic Hero." Of complicated ancestry (admirably traced by Peter L. Thorslev, Jr.), he descends, with inherited traits, from Prometheus, Milton's Satan, the sentimental heroes found in Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, hero-villains in Gothic novels by Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe, Friedrich von Schiller's Karl Moor, and Sir Walter Scott's Marmion. Thorslev insists that, as befits their complex genealogy, Byron's various heroes exhibit not uniformity, but considerable diversity. To stress their distinctions he classifies Byron's protagonists under such rubrics as "Gothic Hero-Villains," "Heroes of Sensibility," and "Noble Outlaws." Among their possible traits are romantic melancholy, guilt for secret sin, pride, defiance, restlessness, alienation, revenge, remorse, moodiness, and such noble virtues as honor, altruism, courage, and pure love for a gentle woman. Their later Byronic incarnations include the heroes of the Eastern tales--the Giaour, Selim, Conrad, Lara, Alp, and Hugo--as well as Manfred and Cain.

According to Thorslev, Harold in Cantos I and II evidences characteristics of such hero types as the Gloomy Egoist, meditating on ruins, death, and the vanity of life; the Man of Feeling, concerned with the suffering caused by war or oppression; and the Gothic Villain, unregenerate or remorseful. Harold likewise reflects Byron's occasional melancholy and loneliness. The narrator embodies Byron's more usual attractive personality. In Cantos III and IV, the Gothic traits are diminished, and those of the Gloomy Egoist and the Man of Feeling combine to form the Hero of Sensibility. He, in turn, is absorbed into the narrator, to produce a sensitive, meditative, melancholy observer-narrator of his pilgrimage.

The drawing rooms and salons of Whig society vied for Byron's presence and lionized him. At Holland House, he met the spirited, impulsive Lady Caroline Lamb, who initially judged him "mad--bad--and dangerous to know." Their tempestuous affair lasted through the summer, until Byron rejected her; she continued the pursuit, burned "effigies" of his picture, and transformed their relationship into a Gothic romance in her novel Glenarvon (1816).

Despite its outcome, his connection with Lady Caroline left him on friendly terms with her mother-in-law, the witty Elizabeth Milbanke Lamb, Lady Melbourne. Through her, in September, he proposed marriage to her niece, Anne Isabella (Annabella) Milbanke, as a possible means of escaping the insistent Caroline. A twenty-year-old bluestocking, Annabella was widely read in literature and philosophy and showed a talent for mathematics. She declined the proposal in the belief that Byron would never be "the object of that strong affection" which would make her "happy in domestic life." With good humor and perhaps relief Byron accepted the refusal; in a letter of 18 October 1812 he thanked Lady Melbourne for her efforts with his "Princess of Parallelograms." By November he was conducting an affair with the mature Jane Elizabeth Scott, Lady Oxford, a patroness of the Reform Movement.

Between June 1813 and February 1816, Byron completed and had published six extremely popular verse tales, five of them influenced by his travels in Greece and Turkey: The Giaour (June 1813), The Bride of Abydos (December 1813), The Corsair (February 1814), Lara (August 1814), and The Siege of Corinth and Parisina (February 1816). Walter Scott had created the market for Romantic narratives in verse, but Byron outrivaled him with his erotic fare set in exotic climes, to the extent that Scott gave up the genre in favor of novel writing; Waverley appeared in 1814.

Byron's Eastern tales received mixed, even contradictory, notices. Critics commended their structure, phrasing, and versification (Monthly Review, June 1813, January and February 1814; Edinburgh Review, July 1813, April 1814) and faulted them in these technical areas (Eclectic Review, February 1814; Monthly Review, February 1816); found their characters well delineated (Eclectic Review, April 1814) and too vague, melodramatic, and incredible (Examiner, July 1821); censured their plots as immoral (Eclectic Review, November 1813, March 1816; British Critic, April 1816) and praised them as virtuous (Eclectic Review, April and October 1814); judged them inferior to, and ranked them higher than, Childe Harold (Monthly Review, February 1814; Quarterly Review, July 1814, respectively); and encouraged Byron to continue the series of narratives (Edinburgh Review, July 1813), only to complain, when he did so, of their monotony (British Critic, March 1814; Eclectic Review, March 1816).

The Giaour, written in the spring of 1813, rapidly went through eight editions before the end of the year, and through twelve editions in eighteen months. During July and August Byron made additions to his "snake of a poem" which lengthened "its rattles every month," from a 407-line sketch to 685 lines in the first edition to the final 1,334 lines of the seventh edition. In this tale, the Turkish lord Hassan punishes the infidelity of his wife Leila by drowning her in a sack (Byron had prevented a similar death at Piraeus in 1810). In revenge, her lover, the Giaour (or non-Moslem), slays Hassan.

The story's fascination as well as its occasional confusion lies in its sudden shifts in time, place, and speaker. Many events are presented out of sequence in a series of what Byron termed "disjointed fragments" ("Advertisement"). Especially striking is his narration of the story from multiple points of view--those of the poet-traveler, of a Moslem fisherman, of a monk, and of the Giaour himself. Thorslev identifies the hero as a remorseful and sympathetic Gothic Villain, who experiences no guilt for killing Hassan but suffers deep anguish for causing Leila's death.

In June 1813 Byron began an affair with his twenty-nine-year-old half sister, Augusta. Married since 1807 to her spendthrift cousin, Colonel George Leigh, she had three daughters and lived at Six Mile Bottom, near Cambridge. With his mother's death in 1811, Augusta became Byron's sole remaining close relative, a situation which doubtless increased his sense of identity with her. While no legal proof exists, the circumstantial evidence in Byron's letters dating from August 1813 to his horrified confidante Lady Melbourne strongly suggests an incestuous connection with Augusta.

In the midst of this relationship, Byron received a letter from Annabella Milbanke, who confessed her mistake in rejecting his proposal and cautiously sought to renew their friendship. Correspondence ensued. He later wrote Lady Melbourne that Augusta wished him "much to marry--because it was the only chance of redemption for two persons."

Through poetry he found relief from his involvement with Augusta and from an inconclusive flirtation in the autumn of 1813 with Lady Frances Wedderburn Webster. In November he wrote Thomas Moore, "All convulsions end with me in rhyme; and to solace my midnights, I have scribbled another Turkish Tale." The Bride of Abydos, published by Murray on 2 December, sold six thousand copies in one month. Zuleika, engaged daughter of the Pasha Giaffir, is also loved by Selim, her supposed half brother (actually, her cousin), the leader of a pirate band. When they are discovered together, Selim is shot by Giaffir's men, and Zuleika dies of a broken heart. For the first time Byron dealt with the theme of incest, his "perverse passion," as he told Lady Melbourne, to which he would return in such poems as Parisina, Manfred, and Cain.

To Thorslev, Selim represents another variation on the Byronic hero--the Hero of Sensibility. Like the Giaour, he is associated with illicit love, violence, and death. But he also enjoys stories and songs, responds to the beauty in nature, and, out of consideration for Zuleika, refrains from avenging his father, murdered by Giaffir.

Another burst of poetic creativity overlapped the success of The Bride of Abydos. Between 18 and 31 December Byron produced a third Oriental tale, The Corsair. For the first time he used heroic couplets for extended romantic narrative rather than for Popean satire. On the day of publication in February 1814 ten thousand copies were sold, "a thing," Murray excitedly assured him, "perfectly unprecedented." Driven by love, the harem queen Gulnare saves Conrad the Corsair from impalement by killing her master the Pasha. Fleeing to the pirate's stronghold, they discover Conrad's beloved Medora dead of heartbreak. United by guilt, Conrad and Gulnare disappear.

Conrad's personality is that of the Gothic Villain. He is "The man of loneliness and mystery" (Canto I), whose name is "Linked with one virtue, and a thousand crimes" (Canto III). Conrad also embodies traits of the Noble Outlaw and the Hero of Sensibility. He displays true chivalry in his rescue of the women in the Pasha's harem, a deed which causes his defeat and capture (Canto II); in his recoil from "Gulnare, the homicide" (Canto III); and in his "love--unchangeable--unchanged" for Medora (Canto I).

On 10 April 1814, amid rumors of the abdication and exile of the emperor Napoléon (which in fact occurred the next day), Byron wrote and copied Ode to Napoléon Buonaparte. On the sixteenth it was published anonymously, though the inscription to Hobhouse revealed its parentage. Since Harrow Byron had had mixed feelings about Napoléon. He admired the titanic qualities of the brilliant strategist, dynamic soldier, and statesman, but he was repelled by his brutal conquest of Iberia and his perversion of liberal ideals. That ambivalence colors the poem. Recalling Napoléon's military triumphs, Byron admits "It is enough to grieve the heart, / To see thine own unstrung," but he also denounces his fallen hero as "a nameless thing," "All Evil Spirit," and "Timor." In the final stanza, Byron celebrates George Washington as "the first--the last--the best--/ The Cincinnatus of the West, / Whom envy dared not hate."

On 15 April 1814 Augusta gave birth to a little girl, Elizabeth Medora. When Medora Leigh grew up, she believed herself to be Byron's daughter, although Byron never acknowledged the paternity, as he did for his other illegitimate off-spring, either because of uncertainty or concern for his and Augusta's reputations. There is no extant proof on either. On 14 May Byron began a sequel to The Corsair entitled Lara, the new name of Conrad the pirate. Murray published the work anonymously in August in a volume with Samuel Rogers's sentimental tale Jacqueline, but Byron's authorship was soon known, and the book sold six thousand copies in three editions. The fourth edition of Lara was a separate printing. Forsaking the name of Corsair, Lara returned to the feudal castle of his youth, followed by his page Kaled (Gulnare in disguise). When Lara is suspected of murdering a man who would reveal his past crimes, he joins a serf uprising and is killed in battle. Kaled, her true identity discovered, goes mad and dies.

In this melodramatic piece, containing much tortured Byronic self-analysis and self-defense, the action is shifted away from the Mediterranean locales of the earlier Oriental tales apparently to an inland region of Spain. A less sympathetic outlaw than Conrad, Lara is proud, scornful, brooding, alienated; his leadership of the peasants' revolt makes him a representative of Byron's liberalism.

Byron spent much of the summer of 1814 with Augusta, while continuing to correspond with Annabella. In a letter dated 9 September, he made a tentative proposal of marriage; she promptly accepted it. In marriage Byron hoped to find a rational pattern of living and to reconcile the conflicts that plagued him. After inauspicious hesitations and postponements, many of his own making, Byron married Annabella on 2 January 1815 in the parlor of her parents' home in Seaham; there was no reception. Halnaby Hall, the Milbankes' Yorkshire seat forty miles distant, was the site of Lord and Lady Byron's three-week "treaclemoon," as the poet called it. Toward his bride the groom was by turns tender and abusive.

At Halnaby Hall Byron resumed work on the Hebrew Melodies, lyrics for airs Jewish composer Isaac Nathan was adapting from the music of the synagogue. The project held much personal appeal for the poet. Throughout his life he was a fervent reader of the Bible and a lover of traditional songs and legends. As a champion of freedom, he may also have responded instinctively to the oppression long suffered by the Jewish people. To the "nine or ten" short poems he had already written he now added several more. He also began Parisina, based on an account in Edward Gibbon of a fifteenth-century tragedy of incest. In April, after a tempestuous visit with Augusta, Lord and Lady Byron settled in the Duchess of Devonshire's London house, at 13 Piccadilly Terrace.

That same month, Isaac Nathan published A Selection of Hebrew Melodies, with Byron's verses and Nathan and John Braham's music. Despite the high price of one guinea for a thin folio, the work sold ten thousand copies in two editions. In the summer, Murray brought out the poetry separately as Hebrew Melodies. Despite the title of the volume, some of Byron's contributions are not at all Hebrew (or even religious) in theme. Along with verses inspired by the Old Testament are love songs and reflective pieces, some written before the book's conception, though in their expressions of sadness, longing, and desolation, they voice sentiments found in the biblical poems bewailing the lost Jewish homeland. The work opens with the now-famous lyric, "She Walks in Beauty," written in 1814 after Byron saw a cousin at a party wearing a dress of mourning with spangles on it. The themes dear to Byron recur in the lyrics based on scripture. A lament for a homeless race can be heard in such poems as "The Wild Gazelle" and "Oh! Weep for Those." The battle cry for Jewish nationalism sounds in "On Jordan's Banks," "On the Day of the Destruction of Jerusalem by Titus," "By the Rivers of Babylon," and, especially, in "The Destruction of Sennacherib" (with its memorable opening simile, "The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold").

Throughout 1815 financial problems and heavy drinking drove Byron into rages and fits of irrational behavior. When Annabella was in an advanced stage of pregnancy, he made her the scapegoat for his troubles. On 10 December 1815, she gave birth to Augusta Ada Byron (the first name was later dropped). Early in the new year, increased money worries forced Byron to suggest that they move from their expensive Piccadilly Terrace address. Lady Byron and Augusta Ada would precede him to her family's estate in Leicestershire, Kirkby Mallory, while he attempted to placate the creditors. Because of his anger and violent utterances, Lady Byron had concluded that her husband was mentally deranged; she drew up a list of his symptoms, which she submitted to two doctors. In Don Juan, Donna Inez, based in part on Annabella, "called some druggists and physicians / And tried to prove her loving lord was mad" (Canto I). Early in the morning of 15 January 1816, Lady Byron and Augusta Ada left London by carriage for Kirkby Mallory before Byron had risen. He never saw them again.

In February Murray published The Siege of Corinth and Parisina in a single volume. The anonymous first edition comprised six thousand copies. The Siege of Corinth, the last of the Eastern tales, recounts, in often slovenly octosyllabic couplets, the Turks' bloody attack in 1715 on the Venetian held citadel. Alp, the poem's hero, is a renegade from Christian Venice, who, as the proud leader of the besiegers, seeks revenge on the countrymen who wronged him.

In the companion piece, Azo, Marquis of Este, discovers an incestuous affair between his wife, Parisina, and his illegitimate son, Hugo, the Byronic hero. Hugo is beheaded, and Parisina is condemned to an unrevealed fate. In construction, situation, and characterization, the poem is arguably superior to Byron's earlier narrative tales. The psychological drama advances without the usual digressive descriptions and intense self-analysis; passions are realized with poetic eloquence. Especially compelling in the triangular relationship which gives the work its strength is the tension between father and son.

From Kirkby Mallory Lady Byron wrote affectionately to her husband in London, urging him to join her. Her subsequent revelations to her parents about Byron's threatening speech and cruel behavior turned them against him. On 2 February her father wrote Byron to propose a quiet separation. Byron was shocked. Unavailing was his protest, in a letter to his wife on the fifteenth, that he loved his "dearest Bell ... to the dregs of [his] memory & existence." A week later, Lady Byron probably confessed to her lawyer her suspicion of incest between Byron and Augusta, adding it to the prior charges of adultery and cruelty; by the end of the month, the rumors about brother and sister were widespread. On 17 March the terms for the legal separation were agreed upon.

During the separation crisis, Byron had a casual liaison with Claire (Jane) Clairmont. That she was the stepdaughter of the philosopher William Godwin and the stepsister of Mary Godwin, with whom Percy Bysshe Shelley had eloped in 1814, may have induced him to tolerate her determined advances, which he had no intention of encouraging.

Byron signed the final deed of separation on 21 April, having decided to go abroad with the completion of this formality. He had bid farewell to Augusta on the fourteenth, Easter Sunday. On his trip he was accompanied by Fletcher the valet, his personal physician, Dr. John Polidori ("Pollydolly"), Robert Rushton, and a Swiss servant. He also traveled with a huge coach, copied from one Napoléon captured at Genappe. On the twenty-fifth they sailed from Dover bound for Ostend. Byron would never see England again.

The party reached Geneva on 25 May 1816. Byron was unaware that waiting for him were Claire Clairmont, pregnant with his child, Shelley, and Mary Godwin. A genuine friendship and mutual high regard flourished between the two poets. They passed the time agreeably by boating on Lake Leman and conversing at the Villa Diodati, which Byron had rented, with its commanding view of the lake and the Juras beyond. In this environment Mary wrote Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, published in 1818.

In June Byron and Shelley sailed to the fortified Château de Chillon. The story of François Bonivard, a sixteenth-century Swiss patriot and political prisoner in the château's dungeon, inspired Byron to compose one of his most popular poems, The Prisoner of Chillon. The work represents Byron's finest verse tale. For the first time he recounts a dramatic story, adapted from fact, about a historical person (as he would do in such later works as Mazeppa and his historical tragedies). The simplicity and directness of Bonivard's dramatic monologue throw into relief the powerful theme of political tyranny. Bonivard, shackled to a pillar by civil authorities for his religious beliefs, reminds the reader of the mythological Prometheus, chained to a rock by Zeus for his gift of fire to mortals, both figures resolutely suffering for their principles and ennobled by their courageous defiance of tyrannical authority. Bonivard's incarceration is effectively contrasted with Nature's liberty as glimpsed through his barred window. Given his engrossing story, his closing confession startles:

My very chains and I grew friends,

So much a long communion tends

To make us what we are:--even I

Regain'd my freedom with a sigh.

A testament to Byron's abilities within the narrow compass of a form he disliked, "The Sonnet on Chillon," preceding the poem proper and treating the same theme, celebrates the "Eternal spirit of the chainless mind! / Brightest in dungeons, Liberty! thou art."

In Bonivard, Byron created a protagonist free from the traits of the typical "Byronic hero," one who possessed greater credibility and maturity than his predecessors. The poem, in turn, expresses deeper human understanding and advances more positive values than earlier works.

On 4 July, three days after returning from his boat tour of Lake Leman, Byron completed the third canto of Childe Harold, which he had begun in early May in Brussels after a visit to Waterloo. Its framework is a poetic travelogue based on his journey from Dover to Waterloo, then along the Rhine and into Switzerland. Having failed to maintain a convincing distinction between himself and his hero in the previous cantos, Byron drops the pretense and speaks in his own right. Harold becomes a shadowy presence who disappears in the middle of the canto, absorbed into the narrator. The new protagonist, a Hero of Sensibility, expresses the melancholy, passion, and alienation of the original Harold, as well as Byronic liberalism, sensitivity, and meditation. If, occasionally, he irritatingly hints at sins and sorrows or descends to bathos, Byron also infuses the canto with titanic power and an elevated style. Because of their many references to lightning, flame, and Prometheus, Cantos III and IV are called the "fire cantos." In a letter to Moore on 28 January 1817, Byron judged this work "a fine indistinct piece of poetical desolation, and my favourite."

Four major themes inform the third canto. The invocation in the opening stanza--made not to the Muse or another classical figure but to Ada, "sole daughter of my house and heart"--sounds the theme of personal sorrow. The poet-hero is alone, in voluntary exile, "grown aged in this world of woe." "Still round him clung invisibly a chain / Which gall'd for ever, fettering though unseen, / And heavy though it clank'd not ...." He remains "Proud though in desolation."

The sight of the field of Waterloo, "this place of skulls, / The grave of France," prompts the second theme, an analysis of the strengths and flaws of genius in Napoléon and Rousseau. Byron recognized himself in the characters of both men. Like Napoléon he was "antithetically mixt," "Extreme in all things," and possessed of "a fire / And motion of the soul" that "Preys upon high adventure." Like "the self-torturing sophist, wild Rousseau, / The apostle of affliction," he "threw / Enchantment over passion, and from woe / Wrung overwhelming eloquence."

Rousseau, whose writings helped to kindle the French Revolution, and Napoléon, whose campaigns doomed the hopes born of that struggle, relate directly to the canto's theme of war. Byron despised wars of aggression waged for personal gain while championing as honorable those conflicts that defended freedom, such as the battles of Marathon and Morat and the French Revolution. Bravura rhetoric animates the stanzas on Waterloo, from the memorable recreation of the Duchess of Richmond's ball in Brussels on the night before the battle, to Byron's grim evocation of war--a contemplation of the futility of bravery and of the blood shed in purposeless slaughter.

Inspired by Rousseau's Lake Leman, the Alpine scenery, and by Shelley's presentation of Wordsworthian pantheism, the pilgrim-poet temporarily experiences the thrill of a transcendental concept of nature, the fourth theme of the canto:

I live not in myself, but I become

Portion of that around me; and to me,

High mountains are a feeling....

.............................

And thus I am absorb'd, and this is life [.]

But Byron's affinity with reality prevented him from "Spurning the clay-cold bonds which round our being cling." Nature would provide him with no permanent escape from himself, no remedy for his suffering.

Near the end he returns to his first theme, of personal sorrow defiantly borne by a Promethean rebel:

I have not loved the world, nor the world me;

I have not flattered its rank breath, nor bow'd

To its idolatries a patient knee [.]

He closes the canto as he began it, with an apostrophe to his daughter, "The child of love."

July 1816 represents a remarkably creative month for Byron. Among other pieces written at this time appear three notable short poems. "The Dream" concisely traces his emotional development from idealism to despair in his love for Mary Chaworth; "Darkness" imagines the last days of the disintegrating universe; "Prometheus" celebrates the triumph of the defiant spirit over torture.

The arrival of Hobhouse at the end of August coincided with the departure of Shelley, Mary, and Claire, who returned to England with the manuscripts of the third canto of Childe Harold, The Prisoner of Chillon, and the shorter poems; at Bath on 12 January 1817, Claire gave birth to a daughter Byron named Clara Allegra, and called by her second name. When a tour of the Bernese Alps with Hobhouse failed to "lighten the weight" on his heart or enable him to lose his "own wretched identity," Byron turned, as usual, to poetry to purge his broodings and guilt over the separation, Augusta, and his exile. The catharsis assumed a form new to him--blank-verse drama. He would write, "not a drama properly--but a dialogue," set in the high Alps he had recently visited. He rewrote the third act during a trip to Rome the following May. Manfred, the eponymous protagonist, is essentially Byron, the drama's conflict a fusion of the personal and the cosmic, its goal relief.

Count Manfred, tortured by "the strong curse" on his soul for some unutterable, inexpiable, "half-maddening sin" (II.i), seeks "Forgetfulness--/ ... / Of that which is within me" (I.i). In the first scene, proud and defiant, he revels in the supremacy of his will over the spirits he raises who are powerless over the inner self:

The mind, the spirit, the Promethean spark,

The lightning of my being, is as bright,

Pervading, and far-darting as your own,

And shall not yield to yours, though coop'd in clay!

The poetic drama signals Byron's rejection of the Wordsworthian belief in the benevolence of Nature. In act I, scene 2, Manfred on the Jungfrau finds no solace among the crags, torrents, and pines. Beautiful and glorious, Nature is also destructive, sending avalanches crashing down "on things which still would live; / On the young flourishing forest, or the hut / And hamlet of the harmless villager."

A passing eagle underscores the Romantic quandary--that the putative "sovereigns" of Nature are "Half dust, half deity, alike unfit / To sink or soar." Frustrated by the limitations mortality imposes on his soaring aspirations, Manfred starts to leap from the cliff, only to be saved by a chamois hunter.

In the underworld of Arimanes, spirit of evil, to whom he will not kneel, Manfred seeks out the phantom Astarte, object of his tragic, seemingly incestuous, love, but for him she has no words of endearment or forgiveness, only the prophecy of his death the next day (II.iv).

As a "metaphysical" poem, in Byron's term, Manfred has as its theme defiant humanism, represented by the hero's refusal to bow to supernatural authority, and by his insistence on the independence and self-sufficiency of the human mind. Unable to find consolation for his guilt in this world or in the supernatural, Manfred does not know what to do at first. With its Miltonic echoes, his great speech to the fiends near the end of the play contains the answer he has discovered:

What I have done is done; I bear within

A torture which could nothing gain from thine:

The mind which is immortal makes itself

Requital for its good or evil thoughts--

Is its own origin of ill and end--

And its own place and time ... [.]

As an abbot witnesses his stoic demise, Manfred explains: "Old man! 'tis not so difficult to die." The unconquerable individual to the end, Manfred gives his soul to neither heaven nor hell, only to death.

As Thorslev notes, Manfred conceals behind a Gothic exterior the tender heart of the Hero of Sensibility; but as a rebel, like Satan, Cain, and Prometheus, he embodies Romantic self-assertion. In Manfred Byron voiced his most profound opinions to date on the aspirations and fate of the human creature. His title character recognizes the mind's boundaries but also its Promethean invincibility and integrity.

After four months in Switzerland, Byron, accompanied by Hobhouse, lumbered in the Napoléonic coach toward Italy in October 1816. Following a sojourn in Milan, they reached Venice the next month. The watery city enchanted Byron with its canals, gondolas, and palaces, becoming "the greenest island of my imagination." For now, he felt that he had written himself out. He began an affair with Marianna Segati, his landlord's wife, attended the conversazione of Countess Isabella Teotochi Albrizzi, the center of Venetian literary-social life, and studied Armenian at the Armenian monastery on the island of San Lazzaro near the Lido.

Murray published Childe Harold, Canto III, on 18 November, and The Prisoner of Chillon, and Other Poems on 5 December. Within a week of publication, seven thousand copies of each volume had been sold. Reviewing these works in the December 1816 number of the Edinburgh Review, Jeffrey proclaimed that "in force of diction, and inextinguishable energy of sentiment," Byron took "precedence of all his distinguished contemporaries," Scott, Campbell, Crabbe, and Moore.

Byron set out in mid April 1817 to join Hobhouse in Rome. In Ferrara, his visit to the cell where the sixteenth-century poet Torquato Tasso had been confined for madness inspired an impassioned dramatic monologue, The Lament of Tasso. Byron identified with this "eagle-spirit of a Child of Song" who, through "Long years of outrage, calumny, and wrong," "found resource" in "the innate force" of his own spirit. Byron was "delighted" with the Eternal City, which he reached at the end of the month.

On 16 June Murray published Manfred, fearful of public reaction to its unorthodox speculations and overtones of unnatural love. To Jeffrey (Edinburgh Review, August 1817), the work suffered from "the uniformity of its terror and solemnity" as well as from its "painful and offensive" theme of incest. Despite these flaws, he said, Manfred remained "undoubtedly a work of genius and originality," its "obscurity" and "darkness" serving only "to increase its majesty, to stimulate our curiosity, and to impress us with deeper awe." Writing in 1817, Goethe considered the poem "a wonderful phenomenon" (London Magazine, May 1820).

Byron settled in mid June at the Villa Foscarini at La Mira on the Brenta, seven miles from Venice. Here, he began to distill his memories of Rome into poetry. Composing rapidly, he had completed the first draft for 126 stanzas of Childe Harold, Canto IV, by mid July, but he revised and expanded the manuscript for the rest of the year.

Continuing the pilgrimage format of the earlier cantos, the framework for this longest of the sections is a spirited Italian journey from Venice through Arqua (where Byron had seen the house and tomb of Petrarch) and Ferrara (city of Tasso and Ludovico Ariosto) to Florence and on to Rome, the setting for half of the canto.

In the prefatory letter to Hobhouse, who provided historical annotations and to whom the poem is dedicated, Byron addressed directly the matter of the hero-narrator. In this canto would be found "less of the pilgrim than in any of the preceding, and that little slightly, if at all, separated from the author speaking in his own person." Byron had "become weary of drawing a line which every one seemed determined not to perceive." A Hero of Sensibility, the pilgrim-narrator of Canto IV focuses sharply on the contrast between the transience of mighty empires, exemplified by Venice and Rome, and the transcendence of great art over human limitations, change, and death. An elegiac tone evoked by "Fall'n states and buried greatness" suffuses the verses. "A ruin amidst ruins," the pilgrim-narrator digresses easily from scenes of shattered columns and broken arches to considerations of his own sufferings and of war and liberty. Throughout, Nature is valued, not for any Wordsworthian pantheism, but for its intrinsic beauty.

The principal theme is immediately established. The days of Venice's glory are no more, "but Beauty still is here. / ... Nature doth not die." Literature, too, is permanent and beneficial:

The beings of the mind are not of clay;

Essentially immortal, they create

And multiply in us a brighter ray

And more beloved existence...[.]

The "mighty shadows" of William Shakespeare's Shylock and Othello and of Thomas Otway's Pierre repeople the Rialto and, unlike the bridge, "can not be swept or worn away." Transcendent also is sculpture--"poetic marble ... array'd / With an eternal glory"--as shown by the Venus de' Medici, the Laocoön, and the Apollo Belvedere. Architecture particularly demonstrates this transcendence. There is "A spirit's feeling," "a power / And magic" in such structures as the Colosseum seen by moonlight (also described in Manfred, III. iv); the "sublime" Pantheon, and St. Peter's Basilica.

The sic transit gloria mundi theme in Childe Harold finds its finest Byronic expression in this canto, which traces through their history and ruins the "dying Glory" of Venice and, especially, the fall of Rome. Inviting the reader to plod with him "O'er steps of broken thrones and temples," the pilgrim-narrator is careful to point out that "A world is at our feet as fragile as our clay," leading to the inevitable ending: "'tis thus the mighty falls."

His delineation of the dictators of ancient Rome prompts him to consider anew tyranny and liberty in his own time. He brands Napoléon as "The fool of false dominion--and a kind / Of bastard Caesar," praises George Washington and the "undefiled" origins of the United States, and blames "vile Ambition" for the failure of the French Revolution. Yet Freedom's banner still flies, and in Freedom's tree the sap still flows--"So shall a better spring less bitter fruit bring forth."

The fourth canto, begun with a view of a prison, ends at the edge of a free ocean. The poet is heartened:

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,

There is a rapture on the lonely shore,

There is society, where none intrudes,

By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:

I love not Man the less, but Nature more [.]

"To mingle with the Universe" becomes a substitute for the Wordsworthian transcendental leap. In his famous apostrophe to the ocean, beginning "Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean--roll!," Byron contrasts its permanence, power, and freedom with vanished civilizations: "Thy shores are empires, changed in all save thee--/ Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, what are they?" The ocean remains, "Dark-heaving;--boundless, endless, and sublime--/ The image of Eternity...."

Melancholy colors the farewell; Byron knew that the Childe Harold theme had "died into an echo." As William J. Calvert writes, "The fourth canto is Byron's final, complete break with the past.... He is from now on committed to truth and reason." Life in Venice had lifted his spirits. Before he finished this canto, he had begun the spritely Beppo, with which he returned to satire and prepared the way for Don Juan.

Late summer 1817 marks a significant development in Byron's literary career. On 29 August he heard about the return of a supposedly deceased husband to his Venetian wife; she had meanwhile taken an amoroso, and then had to choose her husband, her lover, or solitary life on a pension. At this time, serendipitously, he happened to see John Hookham Frere's Whistlecraft (1817), a mock-heroic satire in ottava rima modeled on the Italian burlesque manner of Luigi Pulci, Francesco Berni, and Abate Giambattista Casti. The demanding rhyme scheme of ottava rima--a b a b a c c--encourages comic rhymes. Its couplet allows the stanza to end with a witty punch line, with a reversal in tone from high to low, or with a clever rhyme to surprise the reader. The seriocomic mood, colloquial style, and digressions of ottava rima, no less than his fondness for couplets in his Popean satires, attracted Byron to this verse form as the medium for his witty version of the story of Venetian customs and light morals. By 10 October he had finished Beppo. His new poem, he assured Murray on 25 March 1818, would show the public that he could "write cheerfully, & repel the charge of monotony & mannerism."

The story Byron tells is slight. Beppo, a Venetian merchant, returns home during Carnival after years of Turkish captivity, to discover that his wife, Laura, has taken a count for her lover. After the three pleasantly discuss the amatory triangle, the husband and wife reunite, and Beppo befriends the count. Filling out the slender narrative are the poet's digressions and pointed commentaries. In his asides he particularly contrasts climate, language, attitudes, and customs in Italy and England, to the detriment of the latter; his homeland receives ironic praise. He especially prefers the relaxed moral code of Italy, as illustrated by his heroine Laura who, having "waited long, and wept a little, / And thought of wearing weeds, as well she might" for her missing Beppo, finally "thought it prudent to connect her / With a vice-husband, chiefly to protect her."

In its gaiety, verve, and absence of rhetoric, Beppo signaled a break with Byron's earlier, darker works. Banished is the soul-ravaged hero with his pride and pessimism, replaced by the poet-narrator--conversational, digressive, witty, observant, cynical. The poem's seriocomic manner and idiom reflect with greater clarity and honesty the facets of Byron's mind and emotions as well as his view of the world: satiric, urbane, cosmopolitan, self-deprecating. Though inconsequential, Byron's first attempt at the Italian "medley poem" allowed him to experiment with the style most congenial to his spirit and best suited to his talents. In this fresh, realistic voice he would create his comic masterpiece Don Juan.

Murray published Beppo, A Venetian Story, without Byron's name on the title page, on 28 February 1818, to immediate success. The Monthly Review (March 1818) found Byron's "satire, though at times a little tinged with vulgarity, ... usually good-humoured and often well pointed." In the Edinburgh Review (February 1818), Jeffrey commended "the matchless facility" with which the "unknown writer" "cast into regular, and even difficult versification ... the most light, familiar, and ordinary conversations." The author's "digressions and dissertations"--the bulk of the poem--formed its "most lively and interesting part." Jeffrey even suggested that the anonymous poet had "caught a spark from the ardent genius of Byron."

On 28 April 1818 Murray brought out Childe Harold, Canto IV; the five printings of the first edition comprise ten thousand copies. In the Quarterly Review (April 1818) Scott judged that the last part of "this great poem ... sustained Lord Byron's high reputation," though it possessed less passion and more "deep thought and sentiment" than the earlier cantos.

Early in June Byron moved into the Palazzo Mocenigo, his spacious residence overlooking the Grand Canal (whose length he swam), within sight of the Rialto Bridge. Living with him was his daughter Allegra (brought to Venice by the Shelley party in April), whom he had agreed to support and educate. Here, too, he lodged his fourteen servants, a menagerie, and a veritable harem. His housekeeper was the passionate Margarita Cogni (called "La Fornarina" as she was a baker's wife), Byron's latest inamorata.

In a letter to Murray dated 10 July 1818, he mentioned that he had completed an ode on Venice, and that he had "two stories--one serious & one ludicrous (a la Beppo) not yet finished--& in no hurry to be so." The "serious" poem was Mazeppa, a Cossack verse tale of illicit love and a wild horseback ride. The "ludicrous" work was the lengthy first canto of his comic epic Don Juan, pronounced, for the sake of the humor, to rhyme with "new one" and "true one."

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books

Fugitive Pieces (Newark: Privately printed by Ridge, 1806); revised as Poems on Various Occasions (Newark: Privately printed by S. & J. Ridge, 1807); revised again, with differing contents, and publicly printed as Hours of Idleness, A Series of Poems, Original and Translated (Newark: Printed & sold by S. & J. Ridge; sold also by B. Crosby & Co., Longman, Hurst, Rees & Orme, and F. & C. Rivington, London, 1807); second edition, revised, published as Poems Original and Translated (Newark: S. & J. Ridge, 1808); republished as Hours of Idleness: A Series of Poems, Original and Translated (London: Printed for W. T. Sherwin, 1820).
English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers, A Satire (London: Printed for James Cawthorn, 1809; second edition, revised and enlarged, London: Printed for James Cawthorn, 1809; Charleston, S.C.: Published by E. Morford, Willinton & Co.; J. Maxwell, Printer, Philadelphia, 1811).
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. A Romaunt [Cantos I and II] (London: Printed for John Murray, William Blackwood, Edinburgh, and John Cumming, Dublin, by Thomas Davison, 1812; Philadelphia: Published by Moses Thomas, printed by William Fry, 1812; second edition, enlarged, London: Printed for John Murray, William Blackwood, Edinburgh, and John Cumming, Dublin, by Thomas Davison, 1812; seventh edition, enlarged, London: Printed by Thomas Davison for John Murray, 1814).
The Curse of Minerva (London: Privately printed by T. Davison, 1812; Philadelphia: Printed for De-Silver & Co., 1815).
Waltz: An Apostrophic Hymn, as Horace Hornem, Esq. (London: Printed by S. Gosnell for Sherwood, Neely & Jones, 1813).
The Giaour, A Fragment of a Turkish Tale (London: Privately printed by T. Davison for John Murray, 1813; first published edition, London: Printed by T. Davison for John Murray, 1813; Philadelphia: M. Thomas, 1813; second, third, fourth, fifth, and seventh editions, enlarged, London: Printed by T. Davison for John Murray, 1813; second American edition, from the fifth London edition, Philadelphia: M. Thomas, 1813).
The Bride of Abydos. A Turkish Tale (London: Printed by T. Davison for John Murray, 1813; third and fourth editions, slightly enlarged, London: Printed by T. Davison for John Murray, 1813; Boston: Printed & published by N. G. House, 1814; Philadelphia: Published by Moses Thomas, printed by William Fry, 1814).
The Corsair, A Tale (London: Printed by Thomas Davison for John Murray, 1814; second edition, enlarged, 1814; Baltimore: Printed & published by B. Edes, 1814; Boston: Published by West & Blake, 1814; New York: Eastburn, Kirk & Co., 1814; Philadelphia: Published by Moses Thomas, printed by J. Maxwell, 1814).
Ode to Napoléon Buonaparte (London: Printed for John Murray by W. Bulmer, 1814; Boston: Munroe, 1814; New York: Printed by J. Low, 1814; Newburyport: W. B. Allen, 1814; Philadelphia: Published by Edward Earle, 1814).
Lara. A Tale. [by Byron] Jacqueline. A Tale. [by Samuel Rogers] (London: Printed for J. Murray by T. Davison, 1814; Boston: Wells & Lilly, 1814; New York: Eastburn & Kirk, 1814).
A Selection of Hebrew Melodies Ancient and Modern, lyrics by Byron with musical arrangements by Isaac Nathan and John Braham (London: I. Nathan, 1815); Byron's lyrics republished as Hebrew Melodies (London: Printed for John Murray, 1815; Boston: John Eliot, 1815; New York: Printed & sold by T. & J. Swords, 1815).
The Siege of Corinth. A Poem. Parisina. A Poem (London: Printed for John Murray, 1816; New York: Van Winkle & Wiley, 1816).
Poems (London: Printed for John Murray by W. Bulmer, 1816; New York: Published by Thomas Kirk & Thomas R. Mercein; Moses Thomas, M. Carey & Son, Philadelphia; Wells & Lilly, Boston; Coale & Maxwell, Baltimore; printed by T. & W. Mercein, 1817).
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Canto the Third (London: Printed for John Murray, 1816; Boston: Published by Munroe & Francis, 1817).
The Prisoner of Chillon, and Other Poems (London: Printed for John Murray, 1816; Boston: Published by Munroe & Francis, 1817).
Monody on the Death of the Right Honourable R. B. Sheridan (London: Printed for John Murray, 1816).
Manfred, A Dramatic Poem (London: John Murray, 1817; New York: Published by D. Longworth, 1817; New York: Van Winkle & Wiley, 1817; Philadelphia: Published by M. Thomas, printed by J. Maxwell, 1817).
The Lament of Tasso (London: John Murray, 1817; New York: Van Winkle & Wiley, 1817).
Beppo, A Venetian Story (London: John Murray, 1818; Boston: Munroe & Francis, 1818; New York: A. T. Goodrich, 1818; fourth edition, enlarged, London: John Murray, 1818).
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Canto the Fourth (London: John Murray, 1818; New York: Published by James Eastburn & Co., printed by Clayton & Eastland, 1818; New York: A. T. Goodrich, 1818; New York: Kirk & Mercein, 1818; Philadelphia: Printed by J. Maxwell for M. Thomas, 1818).
Mazeppa, A Poem (London: John Murray, 1819; Boston: Wells & Lilly, 1819; Philadelphia: Published by M. Thomas and J. Haly & C. Thomas, New York, 1819).
Don Juan [Cantos I and II] (London: Printed by Thomas Davison, 1819; New York: W. B. Gilley, 1820).
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, A Romaunt, in Four Cantos, 2 volumes (London: John Murray, 1819; Nuremberg & New York: Frederick Campe & Co., 1831).
Letter to **** ****** on the Rev. W.L. Bowles' Strictures on the Life and Writings of Pope (London: John Murray, 1821).
Marino Faliero, Doge of Venice. An Historical Tragedy, in Five Acts. With Notes. The Prophecy of Dante, A Poem (London: John Murray, 1821; Philadelphia: M. Carey & Sons, 1821).
Don Juan, Cantos III, IV, and V (London: Printed by Thomas Davison, 1821; New York: William B. Gilley, printed by J. Seymour, 1821).
Sardanapalus, A Tragedy. The Two Foscari, A Tragedy. Cain, A Mystery (London: John Murray, 1821; Boston: Wells & Lilly and Munroe & Francis, 1822; New York: S. Campbell, 1822; New York: W. B. Gilley, 1822).
The Age of Bronze; or, Carmen Seculare et Annus Haud Mirabilis (London: Printed for John Hunt, 1823; Cincinnati: Printed for the publishers, 1823; New York: Published by S. Campbell & Son, W. B. Gilley, Collins & Co., Collins & Hannay, E. Bliss & E. White, printed by J. & J. Harper, 1823; New York: Published by R. Norris Henry and E. Littell, Philadelphia, 1823).
The Island; or, Christian and His Comrades (London: Printed for John Hunt, 1823; New York: E. Duyckinck, 1823; Philadelphia: H.C. Carey & I. Lea, 1823).
Don Juan. Cantos VI.--VII.--and VIII. (London: Printed for John Hunt, 1823; Philadelphia: H.C. Carey & I. Lea, 1823).
Don Juan. Cantos IX.--X.--and XI. (London: Printed for John Hunt, 1823; Albany, N.Y.: Printed by E. & E. Hosford, 1823; Philadelphia: J. Mortimer, 1823).
Don Juan, Cantos XII.--XIII.--and XIV. (London: Printed for John Hunt, 1823; New York: Charles Wiley, 1824).
Werner, A Tragedy (London: John Murray, 1823; Philadelphia: H.C. Carey & I. Lea, 1823).
The Deformed Transformed; A Drama (London: Printed for J. & H.L. Hunt, 1824; Philadelphia: H.C. Carey & I. Lea, 1824).
Don Juan. Cantos XV. and XVI. (London: Printed for John & H. L. Hunt, 1824; New York: W. B. Gilley, 1824; Philadelphia: H. C. Carey & I. Lea, 1824).
The Parliamentary Speeches of Lord Byron (London: Printed for Rodwell & Martin, 1824).

Editions and Collections

The Works of Lord Byron: Poetry, 7 volumes, edited by Ernest Hartley Coleridge (London: John Murray, 1898-1904).
The Complete Poetical Works of Lord Byron, edited by Paul Elmer More (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1905); revised by Robert F. Gleckner (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975).
Byron's Don Juan: A Variorum Edition, edited by Truman Guy Steffan and Willis W. Pratt (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1957).
Lord Byron's Cain: Twelve Essays and a Text with Variants and Annotations (Austin & London: University of Texas Press, 1968).
Byron's Hebrew Melodies, edited by Thomas L. Ashton (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1972; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972).
Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, edited by Jerome J. McGann (volumes 1-5, Oxford: Clarendon Press/New York: Oxford University Press, 1980-1986; volumes 6 and 7, forthcoming, 1990, 1991).

Play Production

Marino Faliero, London, Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, 25 April 1821.

Letters

Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, with Notices of His Life, by Thomas Moore, 2 volumes (London: John Murray, 1830; New York: Printed & published by J. & J. Harper, 1830).
The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, 6 volumes, edited by Rowland E. Prothero (London: John Murray, 1898-1901).
Byron's Letters & Journals, 12 volumes, edited by Leslie A. Marchand (London: John Murray, 1973-1982; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973-1982).

Rich holdings of Byron papers are housed in the archives of John Murray, London, Byron's publisher; in the Roe-Byron Collection at Newstead Abbey, the poet's ancestral home outside Nottingham; and in the Library of the University of Texas. Other major institutions with notable Byron collections include Yale, Harvard, the Morgan Library, the Carl H. Pforzheimer Library, the New York Public Library, the University of Pennsylvania, the Henry E. Huntington Library, and the Keats-Shelley Memorial House, Rome. Especially useful is the section devoted to Byron in The Index of English Literary Manuscripts, volume 4: 1800-1900, part 1, A-G, compiled by Barbara Rosenbaum and Pamela White (Bronx, N.Y.: Mansell, 1982).