Selected Poems (6 page)

Wordsworth, Jonathan (ed.), ‘Revolution and Romanticism’ series (Oxford: Woodstock). Several Byron titles in facsimile first editions, with introductions by Wordsworth.

CONTEMPORARY REVIEWS AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY VIEWS

Items relevant to specific texts are cited in the Notes; general resources include:

Arnold, Matthew, ‘Byron’ (preface to
Poetry of Byron
(1881)). In
Essays in Criticism: Second Series
(1888). Frequently reprinted.

Chew, Samuel C.,
Byron in England: His Fame and After-Fame
(London: John Murray, 1924)

Elfenbein, Andrew,
Byron and the Victorians
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). The emergence and reception of ‘Byronism’ as literary and cultural phenomena.

Hazlitt, William, ‘Lord Byron’,
The Spirit of the Age
(1825), in P. P. Howe (ed.),
The Complete Works of William Hazlitt
, 21 vols. (London: J. M. Dent, 1930–34), XI, pp. 69–78

Howell, Margaret J.,
Byron Tonight: A Poet’s Plays on the Nineteenth Century Stage
(Windlesham: Springwood, 1982)

Meisel, Martin, ‘Pictorial Engagements: Byron, Delacroix, Ford Madox Brown’,
Studies in Romanticism
27 (1988), pp. 579–603.

Redpath, Theodore (ed.),
The Young Romantics and Critical Opinion, 1807–1824: Poetry of Byron, Shelley, and Keats as Seen by Their Contemporary Critics
(New York: St Martin’s Press, 1973)

Reiman, Donald H. (ed.),
The Romantics Reviewed: Contemporary Reviews of British Romantic Writers; Part B: Byron and Regency Society Poets,
5 vols. (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1972)

Rutherford, Andrew (ed.),
Byron: The Critical Heritage
(New York/London: Barnes and Noble/Routledge, 1970)

Soderholm, James,
Fantasy, Forgery, and the Byron Legend
(University of Kentucky Press, 1996)

GENERAL CRITICAL STUDIES

For titles relevant to specific texts, see the Notes, for those relevant to
Don Juan
, see Steffan, Steffan and Pratt,
Don Juan
.

Beaty, Frederick L.,
Byron the Satirist
(De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1985)

Blackstone, Bernard,
Byron: A Survey
(London: Longman, 1975)

Bostetter, Edward E., ‘Byron’,
The Romantic Ventriloquists
(1963); revised edn (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1975), pp. 241–301

Christensen, Jerome,
Lord Byron’s Strength: Romantic Writing and Commercial Society
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). How ‘Byron’ was constructed and marketed.

Cooke, Michael G.,
The Blind Man Traces the Circle: On the Patterns and Philosophy of Byron’s Poetry
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969)

Crompton, Louis,
Byron and Greek Love: Homophobia in 19th-Century England
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). Bisexuality, homoeroticism, cultural oppression.

Eliot, T. S., ‘Byron’,
On Poetry and Poets
(London: Faber and Faber, 1957)

Elledge, Paul W.,
Byron and the Dynamics of Metaphor
(Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1968)

Franklin, Caroline,
Byron’s Heroines
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992)

Garber, Frederick,
Self, Text, and Romantic Irony: The Example of Byron
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988)

Gleckner, Robert F.,
Byron and the Ruins of Paradise
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967)

Graham, Peter W.,
Lord Byron
(New York: Twayne Publishers, 1998)

Hoagwood, Terence Allan,
Byron’s Dialectic: Skepticism and the Critique of Culture
(Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1993)

Hofkosh, Sonia, ‘Women and the Romantic Author: The Example of Byron’, in Anne K. Mellor (ed.),
Romanticism and Feminism
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988) pp. 93. –114

Jones, Steven,
Satire and Romanticism
(New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000)

Keach, William, “Words are Things”, and “The Politics of Rhyme”, both in
Arbitrary Power: Romanticism, Language, Politics
(Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004).

Kelsall, Malcolm,
Byron’s Politics
(Sussex: Harvester Press, 1987). Political principles, political impotence.

Knight, G. Wilson, ‘The Two Eternities: An Essay on Byron’,
The Burning Oracle: Studies in the Poetry of Action
(London: Oxford University Press, 1939), pp. 199–288

Leavis, F. R., ‘Byron’s Satire’,
Revaluation: Tradition and Development in English Poetry
(London: Chatto and Windus, 1956), pp. 139–44

McGann, Jerome J., ‘The Book of Byron and the Book of a World’, in
The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method & Theory
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 255–93–,
Byron and Romanticism
, ed. James Soderholm (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Important essays, some revised, and some new adventures and reflections.

McGann, Jerome J.,
Fiery Dust: Byron’s Poetic Development
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968)

Manning, Peter J.,
Byron and His Fictions
(Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1978)

Marchand, Leslie A.,
Byron’s Poetry: A Critical Introduction
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968). Includes a bibliography.

Martin, Philip W.,
Byron: A Poet before His Public
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Byron’s consciousness of, and ambivalence about his audiences; his rivalry with contemporaries.

Richardson, Alan,
A Mental Theater: Poetic Drama and Consciousness in the Romantic Age
(University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1988)

Ricks, Christopher, ‘Byron’, in
Allusion to Poets
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 121–56. Brilliant and canny about Byron’s generous, unanxious ways with literary inheritance.

Roessel, David,
In Byron’s Shadow: Modern Greece in the English and American Imagination
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)

Rutherford, Andrew,
Byron: A Critical Study
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961)

St Clair, William, ‘The Impact of Byron’s Writings’, in Rutherford,
Byron
:
Augustan and Romantic

Shilstone, Frederick W.,
Byron and the Myth of Tradition
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988)

Stabler, Jane,
Byron, Poetics and History
(London: Cambridge University Press, 2002)

Storey, Mark,
Byron and the Eye of Appetite
, (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1986)

Thorslev, Peter L.,
The Byronic Hero: Types and Prototypes
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962)

Watkins, Daniel,
Social Relations in Byron’s Eastern Tales
(Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1987)

Wilkie, Brian, ‘Byron and the Epic of Negation’, in
Romantic Poets and Epic Tradition
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965), pp. 188–226

Woodring, Carl, ‘Byron’, in Politics in
English Romantic Poetry
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), pp. 148–229

ANTHOLOGIES OF CRITICAL ESSAYS

Beatty, Bernard, and Vincent Newey (eds.),
Byron and the Limits of Fiction
(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1988)

Bone, Drummond (ed.),
The Cambridge Companion to Lord Byron
(Cambridge: Cambridge Universit Press 200

Gleckner, Robert F. (ed.),
Critical Essays on Lord Byron
(Boston, Mass: G. K. Hall, 1991)

Hirst, Wolf Z. (ed.),
Byron, the Bible, and Religion
(Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1991)

Levine, Alice, and Robert N. Keane (eds.),
Rereading Byron: Essays Selected from Hofstra University’s Byron Bicentennial Conference
(New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1993)

Rutherford, Andrew (ed.),
Byron: Augustan and Romantic
(London: Macmillan, 1990)

Stabler, Jane (ed.),
Byron,
Longman Critical Reader (London: Longman, 1998)

Wilson, Francis (ed.),
Byromania
(London/NewYork: Macmillan/ St Martin’s, 1999). Cultural life and afterlife.

BIBLIOGRAPHIES

Annual bibliographies, with sections on Byron, are published by the Modern Language Association of America, Modern Humanities Research Association, the
Keats-Shelley Journal, The Romantic Movement
and
Year’s Work in English Studies
.

Chew, Samuel C., and Ernest J. Lovell, Jr., ‘Byron’, in Frank Jordan (ed.),
The English Romantic Poets: A Review of Research and Criticism
, 3rd edn (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1972)

Clubbe, John, ‘George Gordon, Lord Byron’, in Frank Jordan (ed.),
The English Romantic Poets: A Review of Research and Criticism
, 4th edn. (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1985). This report includes a section on bibliographies.

Nicholson, Andrew, ‘Byron’, in Michael O’Neill (ed.),
Literature of the Romantic Period: A Bibliographical Guide
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)

Santucho, Oscar José, and Clement Tyson Good, Jr.,
George Gordon, Lord Byron: A Comprehensive Bibliography of Secondary Materials in English
, 1807–1974 (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1977; 1997, updated through 1994)

CONCORDANCES AND WEBSITES

Young, Ione Dodson,
A Concordance to the Poetry of Byron
, 4 vols (Best Printing, 1975). Co-ordinated with Paul Elmer More (ed.),
Complete Poetical Works of Lord Byron
(1905), revised Robert Gleckner, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975)

The Byron Chronology
, ed. Anne R. Hawkins:
Click here

Byronic Images: Portraits of the Poets, His Family, and Friends
:
http://www.englishhistory.net/byron/images.html

The International Byron Society (texts, portraits, biography, etc.)
:
http://www.internationalbyronsociety.org/

The Life and Work of Lord Byron
:
http: / /www.englishhistory. net/byro.html

The Literature Network: Lord Byron
:
Click here

A NOTE ON THIS EDITION

The basis of the Penguin text of
Lord Byron: Selected Poems
is the edition prepared by John Wright for the seventeen-volume
The Works of Lord Byron: With His Letters and Journals, and His Life, by Thomas Moore,
Esq., published by John Murray, 1832–4. The first six volumes presented
Letters and Journals of Lord Byron: With Notices of His Life
(first published 1830), and Volumes VII-XVII contained the poetry (emending an edition of 1831). Carefully prepared, informatively annotated, handsomely illustrated with engraved plates, and lavishly framed with numerous contemporary comments on Byron and the poems, Murray’s edition virtually defined Byron for the nineteenth century; it still held a claim as ‘definitive’ against Ernest Hartley Coleridge’s seven-volume edition of the poetry at the end of the century (based on the less reliable edition of 1831) and it served as the basis for many editions well into the twentieth century.

Unlike most editions of Byron available today, our presentation follows Murray’s practice of printing Byron’s numerous notes – important textual events in themselves – on the same page as the poetic texts; we also retain the spelling, punctuation, capitalization and italics of Murray’s edition, adding only line numbers for convenience of reference. Our ordering of the contents diverges from Murray’s (and most other editions’) by presenting the works in the sequence of composition and/or initial publication. The distinct advantage is the sense afforded of how Byron’s career developed not only through its productions but also in relation to current historical events, his emerging fame, and his personal circumstances. Thus
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
– to take the salient example – appears in our edition not in toto as it finally did in 1819 but in the units and order of its unfolding publication across the decade. This arrangement both registers the force of Cantos I–II (written 1809–10, published 1812) in launching Byron’s fame and shows how this fame flourished – not through the next two cantos
but in a sensational series of Eastern tales. When Canto III appeared late in 1816, not only was it capitalizing on established celebrity (Cantos I–II had gone through over a dozen editions and the tales were best-sellers), but it also had the resonance of its historical moment, appearing after the decisive defeat in 1815 of Napoleon, Byron’s self-imagined
alter ego
, and the restoration of the monarchies, and bearing the scars of the public scandal of Byron’s separation from his wife and daughter and his expatriation from England in early 1816. Canto IV, published April 1818, did not follow in the train of Canto III so much as that of
Manfred
(published June 1817) and
Beppo
(February 1818), reflecting the former’s suggestion of the termination, or exhaustion, of one kind of melodramatic self-fashioning and the latter’s new mode of ironic self-regard.

In making our selections for this volume, we have chosen poems that defined Byron for the nineteenth century and poems less well known then but figuring in recent years in the lively discussion of Byron and the nature of Romanticism. Except for ‘The Isles of Greece’, which frequent anthologizing has given independent status (albeit problematically), we have not included selections from
Don Juan
, because this work is available in its entirety in the Penguin Classics Volume splendidly edited by T.G. Steffan, E. Steffan and W.W. Pratt (1986; 2004). Thus relieved from representing
Don Juan
, we have been able to provide complete texts of many works that do not appear entire in other currently available selections: all of
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
, replete with Byron’s notes, and all but one of the Eastern tales that elaborated this sensational initial success, from
The Giaour
in 1813 to
The Siege of Corinth
in 1816, again with Byron’s notes. To suggest the range of Byron’s remarkably productive and versatile career, we also offer one of the historical dramas that occupied him in 1820–21 (and which has a soft claim to status as a ‘poem’ in being written, so Byron insisted, more for the page than the stage):
Sardanapalus
. In its wry use of ancient history to highlight questions of imperialism, revolution and gender that were of concern to readers in the early 1820s,
Sardanapalus
has emerged as an important reference in the reevaluation of Romanticism that has been taking place at the end of the twentieth century.