Search Results

“... runs down the years in Grigson’s book. After visiting the menagerie at Exeter Change in London, Byron wrote of a ‘hippopotamus, like Lord L.L. [Liverpool, the prime minister] in the face’, and an ‘Ursine Sloth’ that had ‘the very voice and manner of my valet’. But the capacity for seeing human traits in animals came hand in hand with a capacity ...”

“... take your books of mere poetry and prose, let me read a timetable, with tears of pride. Take your Byron … give me Bradshaw.’ Chesterton’s joke is a sly pun: Baudelaire used the term ‘correspondance’ to evoke the world’s occult, holistic system of connections that our senses synaesthetically perceive, but it’s also the French word for a train ...”

“... found it hard to change his mind. In Seven Types he remarked that it was only in Don Juan that Byron escaped from his infantile incest-fixation on his half-sister, ‘which was till then all he had got to say’. Later he added a note to say he now understood that Byron did not meet Augusta till he was grown up (till he ...”

“... enthusiasm and the most significant phase of Orientalist scholarship were over. In 1813, Byron had advised Thomas Moore: ‘Stick to the East … it [is] the only poetical policy.’ The ‘policy’ had impelled Byron, Southey and Moore to write about the gul-e-bulbul (the stock Persian metaphor for the ...”

“... the Swedish fucking K rifle. It was about cutting a figure’ – a phrase Keats applies to Byron, and with something of the same distaste. Wolff may be in search of his identity, but he’s had his fill of figure-cutting, which is why he concludes the episode by refusing a dramatically appropriate gesture of revenge, the destruction of Landon’s prize ...”

“... in the technique of verse’, and regretted that he was ‘aping the antics of Kipling and Byron’. It is a mark of the division in Read that he was both attracted and repelled by those whose views about art differed deeply from his own. He was overwhelmed on first meeting Wyndham Lewis, called him ‘a great and scandalously ignored painter’, and ...”

“... the breast, And the heart must pause to breathe, And love itself have rest. For Marcus, as for Byron, the ‘rest’ comes with the writing, where the original moments of intensity and truth are recovered in a mode recognised to be minor. But the fate of loss and diminishment secures its romantic revenge, as we see repeatedly in Marcus’s book. He calls ...”

“... frustratingly underdeveloped and short on illustration. Dan Jacobson’s subjects range from Byron to Isaac Babel, from Theodore Herzl the Zionist to the South African Olive Schreiner, and also include some mordant reflections on a D.H. Lawrence conference at Sante Fe and a note on the biblical genesis of his own novel The Rape of Tamar. There ...”

“... I have seemed inordinately to go on,’ the reaction is not, as it is with Pushkin, or Byron, or Fuller, ‘No, not at all,’ but: ‘Yes, perhaps you have.’ This kind of performance requires the irony of an internal dialogue, the more so if the subject is autobiographical. The two sides of Waterman’s manner are a lofty, polysyllabic address ...”

“... than life, or that the criticism of Geoffrey Hartman or Paul de Man is poetry to be read alongside Byron and Blake, or that literature, as a function of class oppression, is a burden from which we must all be set free. ‘For him the insides of books are ... things like those in his own life, real or imagined, real angers, joys, and disgraces, taking place in ...”

“... reflected in their different ways the tendencies which in the larger island were to produce Byron as well as Burns. The rhetoric of sexual celebration, of ironic and discursive epic, of consciously ludicrous classical invocation, of oscillation between Gothic satire and Gothic horror, were so pointedly marked in their work as to induce anguish in the ...”

“... reciprocal barbs of Mr Grigson’s contemporaries with the corresponding performances of Pope or Byron. Mr Grigson has modestly left himself out. But his own scatterings of spleen are among the richer moments of an art in decline, and in one or two poems (‘Committed, or Mr Yeats and Mr Logue’, or ‘Birth of Criticism’) he has preserved some traces of ...”

“... women who were not free to marry him, thereby furnishing protection from decisive action.’ Lord Byron (also on John Murray’s list) once remarked: Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch’s wife, He would have written sonnets all his life? Russell never married. He was of that company called ‘the lost generation’, as described by Jeanne Mackenzie in ...”

“... the greater ode, blank verse or, as a regular practice, standard English. You can’t overdo what Byron termed Burns’s antithetical mind: ‘tenderness, roughness – delicacy, coarseness – sentiment, sensuality – soaring and grovelling, dirt and deity – all mixed up in that one compound of inspired clay!’ Burns was a ‘self-fashioner’ who used ...”

“... when his mother chose to compete for the ardour of two of Caroline’s most famous paramours, Byron and Michael Bruce. Yet his emotional dependence and lack of ruthlessness prevented him from leaving her until his family pushed him into a separation in 1825. Jibes about his subordination to women probably had a permanently damaging effect on him; perhaps ...”