1.
Introduction (by Julia Fernández Chiva)
2. Influences on Byron (by Josué Álvarez Conejos & Paola Enguix Fernández)
Byron, as an
artist, was influenced by many aspects in his life and artists that preceded
him, so in order to analyze his poetry we need to know what it has been
influenced by.
As a child,
George G. Byron was taken by his mother, Catherine Gordon, to Aberdeen,
Scotland, where he attended the grammar school. He was extremely sensitive
of his lameness; and its effect upon his character was obvious. It was rumoured
that his nurse, May Gray, made physical advances to him when he was only
nine. This experience and his idealized love for his distant cousins Mary
Duff and Margaret Parker shaped his paradoxical attitudes toward women in his
life and poems.
At the age of
10, having inherited the title and estates of his great-uncle, the
"wicked" Lord Byron, he started living in Newstead Abbey, a place
that captivated him. He was privately tutored in Nottingham and his clubfoot
was doctored by a quack named Lavender. Later on John Hanson, Mrs. Byron’s
attorney, rescued him from the pernicious influence of May Gray, the tortures
of Lavender, and the increasingly uneven temper of his mother. Hanson took
him to London, where a reputable doctor prescribed a special brace, and in the
autumn of 1799 Hanson sent him to a school in Dulwich.There, the master, Dr
Glennie, perceived that the boy like reading for its own sake and gave him the
free run of his library. He read a set of the British Poets from beginning to
end more than once. This, too, was an initiation and a preparation.
In 1801,
Byron went to Harrow, where his friendships with younger boys fostered a
romantic attachment to the school. He learned enough Latin and Greek to
make him a classic, if not a classical scholar, and he made friends with his
equals and superiors. He learned something of his own worth and of the worth of
others. "My school-friendships" he says, "were with
me passions". Two of his closest friends died young, and from Lord
Clare, whom he loved best of all, he was separated by chance and circumstance.
He was an odd mixture, now lying dreaming on his favourite tombstone in the
churchyard, now the ring-leader in whatever mischief was afoot. It is possible
that these friendships gave the first impetus to his sexual ambivalence, which
became more pronounced at Cambridge and later in Greece, by the time he started
writing his first poems. In fact, Byron’s sojourn in Greece made a lasting
impression on his mind and character - he delighted in the sunshine and moral
tolerance of the people. After leaving, he often spoke longingly of his
visit - and his desire to return. He spent the summer of 1803 with his
mother at Southwell, near Nottingham, but soon escaped to Newstead and stayed
with his tenant, Lord Grey, and courted his distant cousin Mary Chaworth, who
became the symbol of idealized and unattainable love.
After a term
at Trinity College, Byron indulged in dissipation and undue generosity in
London that put him deeply into debt. He returned in the summer of 1806
to Southwell, where he gathered his early poems in a volume privately printed
in November with the title Fugitive Pieces. The following June his first
published poems, ‘Hours of Idleness’, appeared. When he returned
to Trinity he formed a close friendship with John Cam Hobhouse, who stirred his
interest in liberal Whiggism.
At the
beginning of 1808, he entered into "an abyss of sensuality" in London
that threatened to undermine his health. On reaching his majority in
January 1809, he took his seat in the House of Lords, published an anonymous
satire, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, and embarked with Hobhouse
on a grand tour. The agitation of the affairs he lived throughout and the sense
of mingled guilt and exultation they aroused in his mind are reflected in theOriental
tales.
Byron's work
was a synthesis of medieval and classical inspiration with a modern
sensibility. A fascination with Europe's tempestuous, mysterious medieval roots
was current at the time, as it still was when the Pre-Raphaelites - who
rejected the Renaissance and embraced Medieval times, sick of the pretentious
conventionality of the Victorian era - became popular. Like Sir Walter Scott,
who was equally enamoured of the medieval times, Byron found the romantic
notions of Napoleon very appealing. (Byron was Napoleonic to the end, even
having his carriage made as a replica of Bonaparte's).
Regarding the people and works that influenced Lord Byron, we must take into
account that he forms part of the "Second generation" of Romantic
Poets, including Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley and John Keats. Byron,
however, was still influenced by 18th-century satirists and was, perhaps the
least 'Romantic' of the three. His amours with a number of prominent but
married ladies was also a way to voice his dissent on the hypocrisy of a high
society that was only apparently religious but in fact largely libertine, the
same that had derided him for being physically impaired. His first trip to
Europe resulted in the first two cantos of ‘Childe Harold's Pilgrimage’,
a mock-heroic epic of a young man's adventures in Europe but also a sharp
satire against English society. Despite Childe Harold's success on his return
to England, accompanied by the publication of ‘The Giaour’ and ‘The
Corsair’, his alleged incestuous affair with his half-sister Augusta Leigh
in 1816 actually forced him to leave England for good and seek asylum on the
continent. Here he joined Percy Bysshe Shelley, his wife Mary, with his
secretary John Polidori on the shores of Lake Geneva in 1816.
Although his
is just a short story, Polidori must be credited for introducing ‘The
Vampyre’ to English literature. Percy, like Mary, had much in common with
Byron: he was an aristocrat from a famous and ancient family, had embraced
atheism and free-thinking and, like him, was fleeing from scandal in England.
Probably John
Keats does not share Byron’s and Shelley's extremely revolutionary ideals, but
his cult of pantheism is as important as Shelley's. Keats was in love with the
ancient stones of the Parthenon that Lord Elgin had brought to England from
Greece, also known as the Elgin Marbles. He celebrates ancient Greece: the
beauty of free, youthful love couples here with that of classical art. Keats's
great attention to art, especially in his Ode on a Grecian Urn is quite new in
romanticism, and it will inspire Walter Pater's and then Oscar Wilde's belief
in the absolute value of art as independent from aesthetics.
· BIBLIOGRAPHY
USED:
http://engphil.astate.edu/gallery/BYRON11.html
http://www.walrus.com/~gibralto/acorn/germ/GGByron.html
http://www.walrus.com/~gibralto/acorn/germ/Gothic.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_literature
http://www.walrus.com/~gibralto/acorn/germ/PRB.html
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/byron.htm
http://www.online-literature.com/byron
3.
Byron’s characteristics and examples (by Jessica Aguilar Vinyoles &
Cristina Camps Pérez)
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)