GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON

The book features Byron’s early poems Hours of Idleness, hitherto unpublished in Russian, as well as selected poems from 1809–1811 and 1816, and Hebrew Melodies. The book is relevant within the context of Byron’s legacy and Shengeli’s work. It is since the late 1980s that Shengeli’s previously unpublished poems have appeared in press, and we are on a path to better understanding the scope of his achievements. The book opens with Vladislav Rezvy’s excellent introduction to Shengeli’s life and work. Despite the article’s many merits, it still fails to discuss one important topic: Shengeli’s perception of Byron, the ‘comprehensive assimilation of the ideas, imagery, style and poetic techniques’ as described by A. Veselovsky in his time.

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The History of Missed Opportunities

10.11126/stanford/9781503600195.001.0001 ◽

2017 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

William H. Galperin

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

William Wordsworth ◽

Jane Austen ◽

Lord Byron ◽

Missed Opportunities ◽

Romantic Period ◽

The Everyday ◽

Everyday World ◽

History Of ◽

Multiple Levels

This study is about the emergence of the everyday as both a concept and a material event and about the practices of retrospection in which it came to awareness in the romantic period in “histories” of the missed, the unappreciated, the overlooked. Prior to this moment everyday life was both unchanging and paradoxically unpredictable. By the late eighteenth century, however, as life became more predictable and change on a technological and political scale more rapid, the present came into unprecedented focus, yielding a world answerable to neither precedent nor futurity. This alternative world soon appears in literature of the period: in the double takes by which the poet William Wordsworth disencumbers history of memory in demonstrating what subjective or “poetic” experience typically overlooks; in Jane Austen, whose practice of revision returns her to a milieu that time and progress have erased and that reemerges, by previous documentation, as something different. It is observable in Lord Byron, thanks to the “history” to which marriage and domesticity are consigned not only in the wake of his separation from Lady Byron but during their earlier epistolary courtship, where the conjugal present came to consciousness (and prestige) as foredoomed but an opportunity nonetheless. The everyday world that history focalizes in the romantic period and the conceptual void it exposes in so doing remains a recovery on multiple levels: the present is both “a retrospect of what might have been” (Austen) and a “sense,” as Wordsworth put it, “of something ever more about to be.”

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Madness Writing Poetry/ Poetry Writing Madness

10.1093/oso/9780198733706.003.0007 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

James Whitehead

Keyword(s):

William Wordsworth ◽

Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽

English Literature ◽

Percy Bysshe Shelley ◽

John Keats ◽

William Blake ◽

Lord Byron ◽

The Public ◽

John Clare ◽

Romantic Poetry

The final chapter returns to the scene of Romantic poetry, looking at poetry by William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Clare. It reads these Romantic texts as poised articulations of the idea of poetic madness, and discusses generally how these writers contributed to, or interwove with their own lives and works, new and rediscovered mythologies of madness, sometimes anticipating or resisting the public images created by journalism, criticism, or biography, previously described. Finally, the Romantic mad poet is considered in relation to criticism and the canonical role of Romanticism in English literature.

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