RETURN TO POESIA (FIRST PAPER)
1. Introduction (by Julia Fernández Chiva)
2. Influences on Byron (by Josué Álvarez Conejos & Paola Enguix Fernández)
3. Byron's characteristics and examples (by
Jessica Aguilar Viñoles & Cristina Camps Pérez)
Some writers and critics say Byron is the most spectacular personality
in all literature. In his poems, Byron shows the vigor of the movement
displayed in his demands for freedom, for liberalism, and for unrestrained
individualism.
Moreover, the topic that was foremost in Byron’s work is
"himself". Such exhibitionism seems understandable mainly as
compensation for his physical affliction.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Byron)
Byron shows all his feelings and expresses them with some opposite
tendencies such as cruelty and benevolence, sincerity and posturing,
seriousness and flippancy, rationalism and Romantic illusion, conformity and
revolt, courage and self-pity, faith and cynicism.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Byron)
3.1.
Characteristics and examples
Here we are going to talk about Byron's characteristics and give some
examples of them. The first characteristic we can find is the melancholy he shows
in almost all his works. For example in the poem 'And Thou Art Dead, As Young
and Fair' (1812) (www.dim.uchile.cl/anmoreir/escritos/byron.html), where he is
talking about the youth and how quickly time goes and people die.
We can see it clearly when he says at the beginning of the poem:
"And thou art dead, as young and fair
As aught of mortal birth;
And form so soft, and charms so rare,
Too soon return'd to Earth!
Though Earth receiv'd them in her bed,
And o'er the spot the crowd may tread
In carelessness or mirth,
There is an eye which could not brook
A moment on that grave to look"
and also during the rest of the poem. We also found here his worry about
freedom and eternity at the end:
"Yet how much less it were to gain,
Though thou hast left me free,
The novelist things that still remain,
Than thus remember thee!
The all of thine that cannot die
Through dark and dread Eternity
Returns again to me,
And more thy buried love endears
Than aught expect its living years. ".
We also find in his works this kind of repugnance he feels against life.
One example of this is his poem 'Darkness'
(1816)(www.dim.uchile.cl/anmoreir/escritos/b~rron.html), where Byron shows a
very cruel point of view of the human existence, how we only know to kill
ourselves and how this happens day after day, for example when he says:
"The crowd was flamísh'd by degrees;
but two Of an enormous city did survive,
And they were enemies: they met beside
The dying embers of an altar-place
Where had been heap'd a mass of holy things
For an unholy usage; they rak'd up,
And shivering scrap'd with their cold skeleton
hands... ".
Here the author is asking himself why it happens, which is another of
his characteristics, to ask questions without any answer, he just says that we
do this because we are humans, we are the human race.
The most representative characteristic of Byron is his Byronic hero (so
named because Lord Byron used to present a very similar character in his writings
in the late l8th and early l9th century). This hero actually is a
representation of himself and some of his characteristics are that he is
arrogant, cynical, self-critical, introspective and a rebel, a person who acts
in a self-destructive manner, with conflicts with his emotions and sexual
identity, bipolar tendencies and moodiness. We can see it in the poem `By the
Rivers of Babylon We Sat Down and Wept' (1815)
(www.dim.uchile.cl/anmoreir/escritos/byron.html), where he talks about Salem
and its slaughters and how he has to sing that song these poor people killed
there reclaim and has to be free. Here he asks himself again why people do that
and shows his rebel face, but he never shows his feelings, just exposes a fact
in a cruel and sad way. There is another poem where we can see his moodiness,
how he starts with "beautiful" descriptions and ends with a cruel
slaughter:
"The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the
fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the
sea,
When the blue wave rools nightly on deep Galitee.
Like the leaves of the forest when Autumn hath blown,
That host on the morrow lay withered and strown.
For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,
And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed...
".
Furthermore, here he also talks about religion when he says:
"And the idols are broke in the temple of Baal;
... ";
and
in the poem 'Darkness' he talks about religion too when he talks about those
holy things like the reason of those wars, here we can see clearly his rebel
behavior. (www.dim.uchile.cl/anmoreir/escritos/byron/html)
(htpp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%c3%A9roe_de_Byron )
The Byronic hero is one of the most prominent literary character types
of the Romantic period. Romantic heroes represent an important tradition in
British literature. In England, some authors focused on Lord Byron and, a large
number of Gothic novels and dramas, all contain a protagonist who is a Byronic
hero. (http://www.poeticbyway.com/xbyron.htm)
Byron shows a hero who expresses sensitivity: his heroes are
"titans" (figures of vast proportion; god-like) wrestling desperately
with a cruel world of men but torn more deeply by an unnamed inner taint that
galls the heroes more terribly than even the world does.
The first version of Byron’s s hero appears in the opening stanzas of
Chílde Harold's Pilgrimage, canto 1, written in 1812 when the author was 21. At
this stage, the Byronic hero is rather crudely depicted as a young man,
prematurely sated by sin, who wanders about in an attempt to escape society and
his own memories:
Apart he stalk'd in joyless reverie,
And from his native land resolv'd to go,
And visit scorching climes beyond the sea;
With pleasure drugg'd he almost long'd for woe, . . .
(2.565, lines 50-53)
The immediate
precedents for Byron's dark and troubled heroes are found in the protagonists
of the Gothic terror novels of the later eighteenth century. For example, the
Italian Schedoni (in Ann Radcliffe's The Italian, 1797) embodies many of the
sinister and terrifying aspects of Milton's Satan. An equally powerful
influence on Byron was the towering historical figure of Napoleon Bonaparte,
who seemed to combine sinfulness with superhuman power and grandeur.
A pair of these opposite tendencies, rationalism and Romantic illusion,
that Byron used to express his feelings, are shown in Ann Radcliffe's novel The
Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). In which, Emily St. Aubert, the heroine, is tried
as she is incarcerated in the villainous Montoni's dark castle, in which she
manages to rise to each new challenge with strength and rationality after
temporarily giving in to superstition and an excess of feeling. In Ann
Radcliffe's particular form of Gothic, of which Udolpho is perhaps the best
example, mysteries may confound for pages, spectral figures, distant groans and
ghostly apparitions may haunt the heroine, but eventually all is explained and
reason prevails.
(http://www.wwnorton.com/nrl/english/nael72/PeriodlRomantic/CourseSessions1/ByronHero.html)
(http://www.wwnorton.com)
At the same time, another type but clear example could be Heathcliff (in
Wuthering Heights (1845), Emily Bronte's only novel), a very Byronic character,
though he lacks the self-pitying that mars many Byronic characters, and is
deeply attached to the natural world and is considered the fullest expression
of her deeply individual poetic vision. In writing this book, Emily was very
affected by some characteristics used by the romantics, especially, with the
Byronic hero. Heathcliff and Catherine, who have a problem with their
conflicting emotions, represent the theme of fighting for freedom and
liberalism in the novel.
(http://www.gradesaver.com/classicnotes/titles/wutheringheights/about.html)
Another characteristic of the Byronic hero that we can see in other
works is the troubles with sexual identity, which appears in Orlando, who
firstly is a young gentleman and finally is a woman. The strange and fantastic
change of sexuality is influenced by Byron’s works, but Virginia Woolf also
used that to show her own personality.
Typically, the Byronic hero has some sort of dark secret (in Jane Eyre,
for example, Rochester's wife is hidden in the attic). But the Byronic hero did
not end in the 20th cent, because nowadays we can find it in modern pop
culture. For example, Xena, the heroine of the cult classic TV series Xena:
Warrior Princess is a modern example of Byronic Hero, with a few changes. The
most obvious twist is that Xena is a Byronic heroine. She is part of a growing
trend of strong women, tough chicks and female warriors that has become popular
in recent years. The traditional Byronic hero is not only male but in many ways
very masculine. Xena is a woman who both men, and many women desire and who
both men and women admire. Xena has all the traits of the classical, masculine
warrior-hero. She is a great warrior, strong, fierce, courageous and stoic. But
she is also beautiful and sexy in a "femme fatal" sort of way. She
also has, increasingly as her story continues, a soft, loving, protective and
motherly side. (Laughton, Sarah.
http://www.laughton.com/cougar/writing/xena_as_byronic_hero.htm).
Due to these characteristics, the Byronic hero is often a figure of
repulsion, as well as fascination. A perfect way to sum up the Byronic hero:
"beautiful but damned".
3.2.
Characteristics of Byron in other authors
Although it is a bit difficult to find specific characteristics of Byron
in other authors, we can find three authors influenced by him, one is William
Polidori, who was his doctor and used a story written by Byron to write a ghost
story, and because Polidori was his doctor, he spend a lot of time with Byron
and adopt some of Byron’s characteristics that use in his works.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John~William_Polidori).
The other author is Edgar Allan Poe, who started to
read Byron's works when he was a child and was very influenced by him. In his
works we can find power, love, beauty, death and pain, and also irony. Because
of his difficult and hard life, his works show this conflicting emotions and
this pessimist point of view. He also had problems with love and, like Byron,
shows this desire of loneliness. Poe also was a person with a strong feeling of
inferiority that made him a very competitive and arrogant person and sometimes
a bit cynical (as Byron) and he shows it in his works.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_allan~poe/career).
The last author is Shelley, who was a contemporary of
Byron and was influenced by him in a personal way, because of the relationship
they had. Every time they were together, Shelley started to write a new work
inspired in their meetings, as we can see in his works 'Hymn to Intellectual
Beauty' (1816), 'Julian and Maddalo`(1818) or 'Prometheus Unbound' (1818). In
these works Shelley recreates the conversations he had with Byron by using
different or sometimes fantastic characters, as for example, mountains or
devils, like in 'Prometheus Unbound'.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Bysshe_Shelley).
Bibliography:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Byron
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John~William_Polidori
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_allan~poe/career
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Bysshe_Shelley
Home page:
en.wikipedia.org
http://www.poeticbyway.com/xbyron.htm
Home page: www.poeticbyway.com
http://www.dim.uchile.cl/anmoreir/escritos/byron.html
Home page: www.dim.uchile.cl
http://www.wwnorton.com/nrl/english/nael72/PeriodlRomantic/CourseSessions1/ByronHero.html
Home page: www.norton.com
http://www.gradesaver.com/classicnotes/titles/wutheringheights/about.html
Home page: www.gradesaver.com
http://www.laughton.com/cougar/writing/xena_as_byronic_hero.htm
Home page: www.laughton.com
4.
Byronism (by Aina García Coll & Thais
Martínez Alonso)
5. Byron’s
Influence on other poets: Mary Shelley and John William Polidori (by Mª
José Jorquera Hervas)
6. Conclusion (by Manuela Elisa Blanes Monllor, Mª
Llanos García Martínez & Krysia Cogollos Latham-Koenig)
RETURN TO POESIA (FIRST PAPER)