1. Introduction (by Julia Fernández Chiva and Beatriz Lasala Díaz)
2.
Influences on Byron (by Josué Álvarez Conejos and Paola Enguix
Fernández)
First of all, in order to
be able to understand the works of Byron and everything that came after him, we
should know where his ‘poetic genius’ came from, which were the influences in
his life that led him to have such a unique way of living and experiencing
poetry.
2.1. Familiar influences
“If Byron was attractive,
witty, radical, a bright talker and also a bright poet, it’s no less certain
that he also was cruel, mean, amoral, furious and arrogant. It is possible that
some of these last features were hereditary; however, the eccentricities of his
family were not displayed until a relatively late period of his history.”
(Parker, 15)
As Parker points out, many
of the features that we can find in Byron’s character were the result of the
lineage he came from, a family tree that was characterized by continuous extravagances
and scandals. Varela Iglesias talks about ‘the curse of the Byrons’:
Byron
was very familiar since his childhood with the history of his family; his
grandparents, either from his father and his mother side, had always been in
disagreement with the society of their age or had been victims of the strokes
of disgrace. It was due to these familiar antecedents the idea of a curse,
which before or after would reach him.1
So, in a way, he was
eccentric by blood. However, most of the traits that Byron portrayed were not
only hereditary, but they also were highly influenced by the events and
situations he had to live.
One of the first things
that Byron had to face in his life was the situation he had at home. Varela
Iglesias gives a great summary of these circumstances:
The
child that comes to the world on the 22nd of January of 1788 in a modest rented
house in Holles Street, in London, is the result of a poor couple. Catherine Gordon,
a Scottish from a distinguished lineage, shouldn’t have married the captain
John Byron, alias “Mad Jack”, a man full of debts and with a dreadful
reputation of being philanderer … After three years, most of their goods had
disappeared and the couple had continually the bailiffs after them. They ended
living separated most of the time …They argued frequently and sometimes they
even threw plates, but Catherine always ended giving in because deep down she
was still in love with his “Mad Jack”. When the captain died in Paris the
summer of 1971, overwhelmed by debts, his only son, who had been baptized as
George Gordon in memory of his Scottish grandfather, was only three years old.2
Byron’s childhood was spent
in Aberdeen, Scotland, where his mother moved away with him in extreme poverty.
She suffered sudden mood swings, which affected Byron’s inner equilibrium,
because he never knew when he deserved affections or reprimands. She shouted at
him saying things such as “You’re just an egoist, an ungrateful person! And to
think of all the sacrifices I’ve made for you! You’re a monster! You will make
me go mad! You have neither feelings nor heart!” That is why Byron called her
“my domestic tyrant Mrs Byron” (Varela Iglesias, 10-11; Matzneff, 11).
This situation led Byron to
hate the idea of ‘family’, a fact that was noticeably translated to his
writings. Gabriel Matzneff illustrates this idea perfectly in his interesting
book about Byron, originally entitled ‘La diététique de Lord Byron’:
Few
writers would have been less inspired than Byron by his closest family. His
father is absent in his books. Regarding his mother, she’s got the right to a
verse in Don
Juan (VIII, 110) about a young ill Tartar educated by a Christian mother;
she also makes a short appearance in the first lines of The deformed transformed; and then she
is thrown by the trap door … The family –except for noble ancestors dead for
ages, decorative and not very annoying- only evokes on him disgusting thoughts,
and that is why he tries to deny it, erase it from his life and from his
memory. Among an absent father and an abusive mother, Byron, since he was
eleven years old, knew that maternal love was a jail and family was a bunker …
The true family of Byron is that formed by his intellectual teachers, his
friends, his lovers, his puppies, his servants, his animals3, his readers.
By sleeping with his sister, Byron showed how important was the blood family
for him, and Augusta is precisely the only relative who he treated as someone
of his family, who he really loved. When his mother died, he refused to follow
the coffin to the graveyard.4
But, as we will see, though
the family hadn’t any value for him, the situations that he had to live because
of his family had a strong influence on Byron, who during his first years
“experienced poverty, the foul temper of his mother and the lack of a father;
however, he remembered quite well the row and violence of their arguments and
felt a very early aversion towards marriage in view of the homely fights.”
(Parker, 21-22).
2.2. Childhood influences
As Byron himself said, “my
sufferings started at a very early age; so early that very few people would
believe me if I wanted to specify the time and the events that came with them.
Probably, this was one of the reasons of the early melancholy of my thoughts:
to have had a premature experience of life. Many times I go back with my
imagination to the days of my childhood and I am amazed of the intensity of my
feelings at that time: their memory remains indelible even nowadays. My poor
mother, and then my schoolmates with their mockeries, got me used to
considering my illness as a terrible disgrace; after that I have never been
able to overcome this sad feeling.” (Varela Iglesias, 5). As we see, the
influence that Byron’s childhood had on him is closely connected to the
familiar circumstances in which he was born, which we have just seen. After the
loss of his father, it was only his mother who could take care of him, but her
overprotection didn’t help Byron to overcome one of the things that more marked
him in his childhood and throughout the rest of his life: his lameness.
Catherine Byron loved his
son and was particularly worried about his physical defect: the child was born
lame in the left foot. […] As soon as the child learned to walk, she consulted
the doctors and bought him orthopaedic boots. The attention that his mother
paid to his foot made Byron extremely conscious of his defect. In a certain
occasion, while he was taking a walk with his nanny, they met another nursemaid
who said: «What a pretty boy Byron is! What a pity he has such a leg!». The
child, who was 4 years old, flogged her with a toy whip shouting: «Dinna speak
of it!». This complex for his lameness lasted through all his life.5
Some years later, when he
was studying at Aberdeen, Byron became known among his schoolmates as “the lame
devil”. In order to alleviate this, as well as to please the young girls and
also to please himself, he tried to compensate his illness by playing sports,
and then he became a qualified swimmer, an optimum marksman, an excellent
horseman and a quite worthy boxer. Byron had also a complex about his
overweight, so he also carried out an extremely strict diet which made him lose
more than 30 kg, going from more than 100kg when he was eighteen years old to
less than 70kg in the period he carried out the diet (Varela Iglesias, 25;
Matzneff, 14-15).
Another fact that marked
Byron’s life was that he was sexually initiated by his nurse May Gray at the
age of nine. This had a great influence in his posterior libertine attitude
towards sex and love affairs. But this was not a positive influence: He married
Annabella Milbanke in early 1815, but after giving birth to a daughter, they
divorced because Byron was in love with his sister Augusta Leigh and had an
affair with her although he was married. This caused a great stir in the press,
which covered every gossip about Byron’s personal and financial affairs (http://www.neuroticpoets.com/byron).
So, as a kind of
conclusion, we can state that all the difficulties that Byron had to face in
his childhood highly influenced him to be converted into the melancholic,
hateful poet (as well as pervert person, among many other things) he became.
2.3. Influence of his education
“When Byron was five years
old, he went for the first time to school, to a small school near to his house,
in Broad Street. It seems that it had very few resources, but it had a couple
of teachers who were conscious of their task, and Byron learned to read
quickly. He didn’t like much the adventure books that children his age used to
read, but he preferred, or at least that’s what he said some years later, The
Book of One Thousand and One Nights, Don Quixote, Roderick
Random by Smollet, and The Bible…there was no doubt that he knew very well
the Bible and especially the Old Testament from an early age. […] Certainly his
concern about the problem of predestination, which would last through all his
life, began to fascinate him at the age of five or six, with the story of Cain6 and Abel.” (Parker, 22-23).
“In a lot of aspects,
however, his was the life of a normal and happy student. He left the nursery
school and entered the secondary school of Aberdeen, but it seems that he
wasn’t excessively fond of studying. He took place in the school games; he swam
in the estuary of Dee, and at eight years old he felt platonically and very
intensely in love with a young girl who was a distant cousin of him, Mary
Duff.” (Parker, 24).
However, it is during his
scholarly years when Byron found he had a special talent for poetry, as we can
read in the notes that Byron himself wrote to be later revealed by Thomas
Moore:
At
school I was (as I have said) remarked for the extent and readiness of my
general information; but in all other respects idle, capable of great sudden
exertions, (such as thirty or forty Greek hexameters, of course with such
prosody as it pleased God,) but of few continuous drudgeries. My qualities were
much more oratorical and martial than poetical, and Dr. Drury, my grand patron,
(our head master,) had a great notion that I should turn out an orator, from my
fluency, my turbulence, my voice, my copiousness of declamation, and my action.
I remember that my first declamation astonished him into some unwonted (for he
was economical of such) and sudden compliments, before the declaimers at our
first rehearsal. My first Harrow verses, (that is, English, as exercises,) a
translation of a chorus from the Prometheus of Æschylus7, were received
by him but coolly. No one had the least notion that I should subside into
poesy.(…) My school-friendships were with me passions (for I was always
violent,) but I do not know that there is one which has endured (to be sure
some have been cut short by death) till now. That with Lord Clare begun one of
the earliest, and lasted longest — being only interrupted by distance — that I
know of. I never hear the word ' Clare' without a beating of the heart even
now, and I write it with the feelings of 1803-4-5, ad infinitum.8
So, as Moore later says,
“to a youth like Byron, abounding with the most passionate feelings, and
finding sympathy with only the ruder parts of his nature at home, the little
world of school afforded a vent for his affections, which was sure to call them
forth in their most ardent form. Accordingly, the friendships which he
contracted, both at school and college, were little less than what he himself
describes them, "passions".”9
2.4. Influences of his travels
“Before the apparition of
the phenomenon of contemporary massive tourism, the perspective of going on a
trip through the continent produced a great delight in England in the 18th and
19th centuries. It was the “Grand Tour” through France, Italy, western Germany,
Switzerland and Netherlands. Lord Byron, inclined by temperament to what’s
exotic and strange, preferred to start the trip by the oriental Mediterranean
route, for what he had to travel across Portugal and Spain before. […] The 2nd
of July of 1809 Byron boarded with his friend J.C. Hobbouse in the “Princess
Elizabeth” en route to Lisbon, where he stayed for twelve days…” After that, he
spent a month travelling around Spain, and it seems he enjoyed his stay in this
country because he wrote in a letter to Hodgson: “I will come back to Spain
before going back to England, because I have fallen in love with this country”…but
he finally didn’t. However, Spain left an unforgettable mark in the soul of the
poet, as we can see in the bright and passionate description he gave in the
first canto of ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’, as well as in other poems
and notes in which he reflects the fascination he felt for this country.
(Varela Iglesias, 6-7).
However, his trip didn’t
finish in Spain, but the 16th of August he left Cadiz en route to Gibraltar and
then he boarded towards Malta, Turkey and Greece. This second part of the Grand
Tour made a great impression on him. When he visited Athens, Byron developed a special
devotion for Greece and all the Greek culture. As he said, Athens made him feel
as “returning to home”. He even swam through the Hellespont from the Asian
coast (Sestos) to the European coast (Abydos), as the legendary Leander did. In
these later travels is where Byron took his inspiration from to write the poems
that made him famous when he returned to England. (Varela Iglesias, 14).
2.5. Contextual influence
The literary time in which
Byron lived was in the Romanticism. Elizabeth Whitney tries to give a
definition of ‘Romanticism’ in her personal website as:
A movement in art and
literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in revolt against the
Neoclassicism of the previous centuries...The German poet Friedrich Schlegel,
who is given credit for first using the term romantic to describe
literature, defined it as "literature depicting emotional matter in an
imaginative form." This is as accurate a general definition as can be
accomplished, although Victor Hugo's phrase "liberalism in literature"
is also apt. Imagination, emotion, and freedom are certainly the focal points
of romanticism. Any list of particular characteristics of the literature of
romanticism includes subjectivity and an emphasis on individualism;
spontaneity; freedom from rules; solitary life rather than life in society; the
beliefs that imagination is superior to reason and devotion to beauty; love of
and worship of nature; and fascination with the past, especially the myths and
mysticism of the middle ages.10
However, “when we speak of
romantic writing, even within its periodic context, we refer to a body of
extremely diverse materials. The historic impossibility of defining the term
'romantic' reflects this diversity. Byron's romanticism - a form that loomed
over the practice of nineteenth-century poetry throughout Europe - differs
sharply from Wordsworth's and Coleridge's romanticism, which later came to
control the way the twentieth-century tended to think about romantic work.”11
In Childe Harold’s
Pilgrimage we can see some of the features that Byron took from
Romanticism. Cantos I and II are just a descriptive mixture between history and
travelling; Canto III is a poem in the confessional mode of Rousseau and
Wordsworth which reflects the first imaginative maturity of Byron; and canto IV
tries to give a synthesis of the two last poems. Byron called the entire series
A. Romaunt. Both the title and the kind of verse (Spenserian verse)
are derived from the romance tradition. The theme of the search in the romance,
previously internalized by Blake and Keats, appears again in Shelley’s Alastor
and in Keats’ Endimion, under the influence of Wordsworth. The third
Canto of Childe Harold shows a more superficial influence from
Wordsworth, due both to the relationship of Byron with Shelley in 1816 and to
his reading of ‘The Excursion’. The theme of a search out of
alienation and towards an unknown good is a recurrent theme in the Romantics
(Bloom, 201).
But the Romantic influence
in Byron is not only present in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. In his
lecture analyzing Byron’s Don Juan, Claire Colebrook says:
“According to Mellor, this
is what makes Byron Romantic. Like Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley Byron has
a sense of the spirit, subjectivity or infinite life which surpasses definition
and language; his poetry therefore draws attention to its status as formed.
We cannot avoid the illusion of form; and so Byron gives us the loving and
believing Juan who engages in a series of love affairs and political
activities. But the narrator de-forms the sense Juan makes of the world,
drawing attention to the fact that all forms of self and personality are
fictions.” (http://www.englit.ed.ac.uk/studying/undergrd/english_lit_2/Handouts/cmc_byron.htm).
As a conclusion, I will
quote Jerome McGann, who gives an accurate summary of Byron’s contextual
influences:
Byron's work
was a synthesis of medieval and classical inspiration with a modern
sensibility. A fascination with Europe's tempestous, mysterious medieval roots
was current at the time, as it still was when the Pre-Raphaelites became
popular. Like Sir Walter Scott (who was equally enamored 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.)
But it
wasn't just his politics that made him appealing-- Byron was titled. When he
read his poetry, people listened. Since Byron was so like a rock star,
I find it appropriate to quote a rocker (Joe Strummer when he was with the
Clash), "I wasn't born so much as I fell out." That was Lord
Byron. Falling into things, seeing where the wind carried him. Poetry, the
Greeks, Napoleonic politics-- they all fell into step easily with his life. (http://www.walrus.com/~gibralto/acorn/germ/GGByron.html).
So, as we have seen, there
were many things that happened in his life that influenced Byron in his later
works. And it is important to take them into account because, as Brenda C.
Mondragon says, “Lord Byron’s life, at his time and nowadays, is more known not
by his poetic facet, though it was considerable, but by his own existence,
entirely romantic.”12
1 Varela Iglesias, 26.
2 Varela Iglesias, 9-10.
3“Throughout all his life, Byron enjoyed surrounding
herself with animals that not always belonged to the most typically domestic
species. At Cambridge University, for instance, he had acquired a bear and he
walked it frequently around the city streets. In the same period he used to
wear suits whose colour matched that of his horse … In Venice, the visitors,
astonished, found peacocks, monkeys, dogs, cats, parrots and a raven in the
stairs of the Mocenigo palace.” (Varela Iglesias, 29-30).
4 Matzneff, 11-12.
5 Parker, 22
6In 1821, he published a dramatic piece entitled ‘Cain’. For him, Cain is
the first Romantic (Bloom, 219).
7 Byron later published a poem entitled ‘Prometheus’ in
1816, in ‘The Prisoner of Chillon and
other poems’
8 Moore, Thomas. Notices of the Life of Lord Byron.
<http://englishhistory.net/byron/moorebyron.html>
9 Moore, Thomas. Notices of the Life of Lord Byron.
<http://englishhistory.net/byron/moorebyron.html>
10 Whitney, Elizabeth. What is Romanticism? <http://www.uh.edu/engines/romanticism>
11 McGann, Jerome. Mc Gann’s Introduction. <http://www.orgs.muohio.edu/anthologies/mcgann2.htm>
12 Mondragon, Brenda C. Neurotic Poets: Lord Byron. <http://www.neuroticpoets.com/byron>
2.6. Bibliography used
· Bloom, Harold. Los poetas visionarios del Romanticismo inglés: Blake, Byron, Shelley, Keats. Trad. Mariano Antolín. Barcelona: Barral, 1974.
· Matzneff, Gabriel. Lord Byron: La perversión diaria. Trad. Jordi Marfà. Barcelona: Laia, 1987.
· Parker, Derek. Byron. Trad. Rosario León Cuyás. Barcelona: Salvat, 1988.
· Varela Iglesias, Fernando. Byron. Madrid: Prensa Española, 1971.
· Cardona Gamio, Estrella. George Gordon, Lord Byron. C. Cardona
Gamio Ediciones. 17 Dec. 2006.
<http://www.ccgediciones.com/Sala_de_Estar/Biografias/Lord
Byron.html>
· Colebrook, Claire. Byron,
Don Juan. University of Edinburgh. 20 Dec. 2006.
<http://www.englit.ed.ac.uk/studying/undergrd/english_lit_2/Handouts/cmc_byron.htm>
· Hanson, Marilee. The
Life and Work of Lord Byron (1788-1824). 11 Feb. 2003. EnglishHistory.net.
17 Dec. 2006. <http://englishhistory.net/byron>
· McGann, Jerome. Mc
Gann’s Introduction. 20 Dec. 2006. <http://www.orgs.muohio.edu/anthologies/mcgann2.htm>
· Mondragon, Brenda C. Neurotic
Poets: Lord Byron. May 2005. NeuroticPoets.com. 17 Dec. 2006. <http://www.neuroticpoets.com/byron>
· Wise-Lawrence, Meg. Lord
Byron. 20 Dec. 2006. <http://www.walrus.com/~gibralto/acorn/germ/GGByron.html>
· Whitney, Elizabeth. What
is Romanticism? 7 Feb. 2000. University of Houston. 20 Dec. 2006. <http://www.uh.edu/engines/romanticism>
· “Lord Byron – George
Gordon”. El Poder de la Palabra - epdlp.com. 17 Dec. 2006. <http://www.epdlp.com/escritor.php?id=1523>
3.
Byron’s characteristics and examples (by Jessica Aguilar Vinyoles and Cristina
Camps Pérez)
3.1.
Characteristics and examples
3.2.
Characteristics of Byron in other authors
4.
Byronism (by Aina García Coll and Thais Martínez Alonso)
4.1.
Bibliography used
5.
Byron’s Influence on other poets (by Krysia Cogollos Latham-Koenig and Mª
José Jorquera Hervas)
5.1. Byron’s
influence on Shelley and Keats
5.2.
Frankestein
5.3. The
Vampyre
5.4. Byron’s
influence on other artists
6. Conclusion (by Manuela Elisa Blanes Monllor and Mª Llanos García Martínez)