Subject: george gordon byron's revolutionary romantic impressions in the novel "don juan" table of contents plan: Introduction chapter I. Bayron's political free thought

Byron’s valuable contribution in Romanticism period.

One of the most prominent representative of Romantic literature in England was Lord George Gordon Byron. Byron was committed to the educational ideals and aesthetics of classicism, but he was a romantic poet. In his work the recognition of the classic rigor and clarity was combined with the image of the complex and ambiguous feelings, painted in a gloomy mood, but also with irony.
The moon is up, and yet it is not night;
Sunset divides the sky with her; a sea
Of glory streams along the Alpine height
Of blue Friuli's mountains; Heaven is free
From clouds, but of all colours seems to be.⁴
In the romantic poems we see the strong desire to image bright and sharp contrasts , also in the image of nature. Romantics often sought to portray a violent nature, and Byron seemed liked the the presence of danger, a storm for him was a symbol of the great, though often fatal passions.
The most notorious of the major Romantics, George Gordon, Lord Byron, was also the most fashionable poet of the day. To this day he remains a legend. He was the hero of all his poems, but his real life was far more exciting than anything that he wrote. He was a man possessed by self-pity, self-consciousness and self-love. He created an immensely popular character –defiant social outcast, brooding and mysterious, haunted by secret guilt, yet charming and courageous – for which he was the model. Byron created a romantic archetype which was to last well into the 19th century.
The love of liberty and freedom, coupled with a melancholy disposition rooted in solitude, became an expression of what many people of the time interpreted as the Romantic hero.
Although his work is often classified in anthologies alongside other Romantic poets, and despite the fact that his poems do contain obvious elements that were so characteristic of Romantic writing, Lord Byron can justifiably be considered to have created a hybrid genre in which he experimented with various poetic forms to create a style that was uniquely his own. An analysis of three of his poems, “Written After Swimming from Sestos to Abydos," “Don Juan: Canto I," and “She Walks in Beauty," helps the reader to understand how romantic and neoclassical elements both complement and contradict one another in the larger body of Lord Byron’s poetic works. Rather than align himself with any single poetic school, Byron was able to draw from the strengths and benefits of several styles, and his poems are all the better for having done so. These three poems by Byron, “Written After Swimming from Sestos to Abydos," “Don Juan: Canto I," and “She Walks in Beauty" demonstrate the way in which the interplay of romantic and neoclassical elements evolved over the course of Byron’s poetic career.
Byron looked upon love as free but unattainable in the ideal, an idea springing from his own multitude of affairs and ultimate lack of happiness in any of them.
Don Juan is a mock epic in that its protagonist—while often heroic (as in the battle of Ismail in Canto VIII)—is in fact naïve, his adventures in love almost entirely the result of accidents. Byron accentuates its comic tone with playful rhymes and, in particular, incisive homonyms. Byron makes his satire of the classical epics clear in Canto I, where he notes that “Most epic poets plunge ‘in medias res’” (in the middle of the story) (1.6.41), but then states, “That is the usual method, but not mine” (1.7.49), thus telling the tale of Don Juan from the very beginning: his birth.
Several of Byron’s poems, particularly those based on his travels, raise the problem of oppression throughout Europe and defend the necessity of human liberty. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage often digresses into long tirades against oppressors. These poetic reflections bear witness to Byron' experience with battlefields of old, such as Waterloo, and present struggles such as the Greek struggle against Ottoman/Turkish occupation. Perhaps his most powerful statement against oppression is found in “The Prisoner of Chillon,” in which he traces the eventual mental oppression of a patriot who stood against the oppression of his people. To Byron, liberty is a right of all human beings, while the denial of liberty is one of mankind’s greatest failings.

To Byron, Nature was a powerful complement to human emotion and civilization. Unlike Wordsworth, who idealized Nature and essentially deified it, Byron saw Nature more as a companion to humanity. Certainly, natural beauty was often preferable to human evil and the problems attendant upon civilization, but Byron also recognized Nature’s dangerous and harsh elements. “The Prisoner of Chillon” connects Nature to freedom, while at the same time showing Nature’s potentially deadly aspects in the harsh waves that seem to threaten to flood the dungeon. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage looks to Nature as a refuge from human conflict, but sees there, amid the avalanches and volcanoes, the seething fury of the natural world.

Throughout his life, Byron sought the perfect object of his affections, which paradoxically made him a fickle and unstable lover to many women (and men). His poetry reflects this tension, although usually with the weight being on the side of capricious love. He idealizes women he knows in his opening stanzas to the first three cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, turning them into muses who inspire their respective narratives. However, the fact that each canto has a different woman as its muse points to infidelity on the part of Byron’s creative genius. “She Walks in Beauty,” perhaps his most famous poem dedicated to an individual woman, extols the virtues of a woman with whom Byron was never romantically involved. This theme recurs throughout Byron’s poetry: the ideal love is that which is unattainable. Finally, in Don Juan Byron mocks the ideal of love even as his hapless protagonist falls into various women’s beds.
Although he was a Romantic poet, Byron saw much of his best work as descriptions of reality as it exists, not how it is imagined. Thus, the subjects of many of his poems come from history and personal experience. “The Prisoner of Chillon” was inspired by the real-life imprisonment of Francois de Bonnivard, while Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is more biographical travelogue than adventure tale. Even the apocalyptic “Darkness” was written to reflect the mass hysteria that arose out of superstitious prophetic interpretations related to the natural disaster of a volcano’s eruption.
While Byron was by no means the prophet of apocalypse that his fellow Romantic poet William Blake was, Byron’s poetry nonetheless returns time and again to a “day of reckoning.” The most obvious example of this theme is “Darkness,” a vision of a future earth nearly devoid of life and populated by creatures no longer human. More subtly, Byron insisted that the leaders of oppressive civilizations and the men who would destroy the works of the past would face their own days of judgment. This day would be hastened by Byron, who cast aspersions upon their characters in his writings, such as he did with Lord Elgin and Napoleon.

Byron early became aware of reality’s imperfections, but the skepticism and cynicism bred of his disillusionment coexisted with a lifelong propensity to seek ideal perfection in all of life’s experiences. Consequently, he alternated between deep-seated melancholy and humorous mockery in his reaction to the disparity between real life and his unattainable ideals. The melancholy of Childe Harold and the satiric realism of Don Juan are thus two sides of the same coin: the former runs the gamut of the moods of Romantic despair in reaction to life’s imperfections, while the latter exhibits the humorous irony attending the unmasking of the hypocritical facade of reality.

Byron’s plays are not as highly regarded as his poetry. He provided Manfred,Cain, and the historical dramas with characters whose exalted rhetoric is replete with Byronic philosophy and self-confession, but these plays are truly successful only insofar as their protagonists reflect aspects of Byron’s own personality.
Byron was a superb letter writer, conversational, witty, and relaxed, and the 20th-century publication of many previously unknown letters has further enhancedhis literary reputation. Whether dealing with love or poetry, he cuts through to the heart of the matter with admirable incisiveness, and his apt and amusing turns of phrase make even his business letters fascinating.
Byron showed only that facet of his many-sided nature that was most congenialto each of his friends. To Hobhouse he was the facetious companion, humorous,cynical, and realistic, while to Edleston, and to most women, he could be tender, melancholy, and idealistic. But this weakness was also Byron’s strength. His chameleon-like character was engendered not by hypocrisy but by sympathy and adaptability, for the side he showed was a real if only partial revelation of his true self. And this mobility of character permitted him to savour and to record the mood and thought of the moment with a sensitivity denied to those tied to the conventions of consistency.
Byron exercised a marked influence on Continental literature and art, and his reputation as a poet is higher in many European countries than in Britain or America, although not as high as in his time, when he was widely thought to be the greatest poet in the world.^[23] Byron's writings also inspired many composers. Over forty operas have been based on his works, in addition to three operas about Byron himself (including Virgil Thomson's Lord Byron).