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


CHAPTER II. THE THEME OF THE PIRATE HERO IN BAYRON'S CREATION, HIS EARLY POEMS


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GEORGE GORDON BYRON\'S R

CHAPTER II. THE THEME OF THE PIRATE HERO IN BAYRON'S CREATION, HIS EARLY POEMS.
2.1. Byron's poem "Prometheus" is the human pain of those living on earth

His poetry was set to music by many Romantic composers, including Mendelssohn, Carl Loewe, and Robert Schumann. Among his greatest admirers was Hector Berlioz, whose operas and Mémoires reveal Byron's influence.


The figure of the Byronic hero pervades much of his work, and Byron himself is considered to epitomise many of the characteristics of this literary figure.
The Byronic hero presents an idealised, but flawed character whose attributes include: great talent; great passion; a distaste for society and social institutions; a lack of respect for rank and privilege (although possessing both); being thwarted in love by social constraint or death; rebellion; exile; an unsavory secret past; arrogance; overconfidence or lack of foresight; and, ultimately, a self-destructive manner. These types of characters have since become ubiquitous in literature and politics.
The majority of the essays in Byron and Romanticism are taken from the early 1990s and borrow from this single insight: that truth and falsity, and good and bad style, are barren claims for a reading of Byron, just as Wordsworthian sincerity, on which the history of disciplinary Romanticism rests, is deconstructed by Byronic theatricality: "Byron puts on a mask and is able to tell the truth about himself—a truth that comes across only because the text at the literal level is an imaginary execution of the denial of that truth"5
Philosophically and stylistically, Byron stands apart from the other major Romantics. He was the least insular, the most cosmopolitan of them. Poetic imagination was not for him, as for them, the medium of revelation of ultimate truth. He wished that Coleridge would "explain his Explanation" of his thought (Dedication to Don Juan). He did not embrace for long Wordsworth’s belief in the benevolence of nature, espouse Shelley’s faith in human perfectibility, or experience Keats’s private vision.
In narrative skill, Byron has no superior in English poetry, save Geoffrey Chaucer; as Ronald Bottrall notes, Byron, like his illustrious predecessor, could "sum up a society and an era." His subjects are fundamental ones: life and death, growth and decay, humankind and nature. His "apotheosis of the commonplace" is, to Edward E. Bostetter, "one of his great contributions to the language of poetry." Lacking the inhibitions of his contemporaries, Byron created verse that is exuberant, spontaneous, expansive, digressive, concrete, lucid, colloquial—in celebration of "unadorned reality."
"I was born for opposition," Byron proclaimed in Don Juan, Canto XV. The outstanding elements of his poetry both support his self-analysis and insure his enduring reputation. As a major political and social satirist, he starts, in the Classical and Augustan manner, with a fixed standard of judgment, then, in either seriocomic or savage tones, repeatedly denounces war, tyranny, and hypocrisy.

As an untiring champion of liberty, he firmly believed that "Revolution / Alone can save the earth from hell’s pollution"6, a tenet he defended with his life.
Example of words of Byron, who very often expressed his love to nature, points to the fact that the subjective relationship with nature is very important feature of Romanticism.
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.

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.


Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean-roll!
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;
Man marks the earth with ruin-his control
Stops with the shore;-upon the watery plain
The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain…
(Byron G. "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage", Canto II, CLXXIX)
When one considers the dialogue between Romantic lyricism and ill-tempered theatricality, Byron's poetic procedures come first to mind. However, studies of Byron's engagement with satire tend to downplay the importance of anger, probably because Don Juan bestrides his satiric poetry like a colossus, and most readers understand the modes and methods of that poem -- the digression, the lampoon, the sly wink, the humorous deflation of hypocrisy -- as paradigmatic for Byron's work as a whole. Furthermore, a focus on the satires alone excludes a large portion of Byron's poetry of anger and revenge. Byron characteristically combines satiric impulses with a dramatic sense of himself as a figure of vengeance. As a result, he expresses anger most frequently and exuberantly as a curse: a ritualized declamation of ill will that performs his wrath. For Byron, the resulting angry poetry -- a combination of satire, dramatic curse, and confessional lyric -- opposes Romantic sincerity with its theatricality, Romantic sympathy with its alienating effects, and Romantic transcendence with its commitment to worldly cycles of retribution.
Of these aspects of Byron's poetry that challenge Romantic aesthetics, self-dramatization is the most familiar.

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