Posted on 04/19/2024 4:31:22 PM PDT by Borges
This week is the 200th anniversary of Lord Byron’s death. The most famous poet of his age (an odd phrase now) died fighting for Greek independence in the marshes of Missolonghi. “Who would write, who had anything better to do?” he once said. There was a strange contest over his body and memory: The lungs and larynx remained in Greece but friends carried the rest back to England, where huge crowds followed the funeral procession. A month after his death, his former editor burned his memoirs, worried they would damage the reputation of a superstar read around the world.
Does anyone read Byron now? He’s one of those unusual figures who have become better known for the lives they led than the books they wrote. Even some of his fans admire the letters more than the poems. It isn’t totally clear what it means to say that Byron is your favorite poet. Of the so-called Big Six Romantics, he’s the hardest to place. The hikers and the introverts read Wordsworth, the hippies love Blake, Keats is for the purists, Shelley for the political dreamers … and Byron? In spite of his fame, he lacks brand recognition. That’s partly because, halfway through his career, he decided to change the brand. “If I am sincere with myself,” he once wrote, “(but I fear one lies more to one’s self than to any one else), every page should confute, refute and utterly abjure its predecessor.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
About the stuff I’m saying right now, I’ll contradict it shortly!
Of course people still read his poetry today! What kind of a je jeune, pathetic thing for a supposed adult to write!
And he died from measles, not war wounds!
Mad, bad, & dangerous to know.
The Destruction of Sennacherib
By Lord Byron (George Gordon)
The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold, And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold; And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea, When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.
Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green, That host with their banners at sunset were seen: Like the leaves of the forest when Autumn hath blown, That host on the morrow lay withered and strown.
For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast, And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed; And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill, And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!
And there lay the steed with his nostril all wide, But through it there rolled not the breath of his pride; And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf, And cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf.
And there lay the rider distorted and pale, With the dew on his brow, and the rust on his mail: And the tents were all silent, the banners alone, The lances unlifted, the trumpet unblown.
And the widows of Ashur are loud in their wail, And the idols are broke in the temple of Baal; And the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword, Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord
First I'm hearing of Blake being measured against the other five. In my day it was Byron, Keats & Shelley, early romantic English period, and Coleridge and Wordsworth, late.
Raconteur and Watergate burglar George Gordon "G-Man" Liddy was named after George Gordon, Lord Byron.
Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge came before the other three.
mark
That movement in poetry and lit led inexorably to the greeting card industry, imho. :^)
“Adonaïs: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats, Author of Endymion, Hyperion, etc. by Percy Bysshe Shelley.”
0:29
Nigel Verney
3.49K subscribers
20,207 views
October 12, 2017
Shelley’s elegy for Keats.
Read by Vincent Price.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAqXaUQR8-Q
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