Search Results

“... In February 1812, Byron stood up to speak for the first time in the House of Lords. His speech was a passionate defence of the Nottingham weavers – followers of the mythical King Ludd – who had been smashing the new mechanical stocking-frames; and for the rest of his life Byron went on arguing that ‘we must not allow mankind to be sacrificed to improvements in mechanism ...”

“... more depth than if it were just a marathon competition in sex and swimming. The highly competitive Byron saw it in that light. After he had swum the Hellespont (‘Leander, Mr Ekenhead, and I did’), he noted that Leander’s ‘conjugal powers’ must have been a trifle exhausted, because the tide was so rapid and strong. He found it easier to swim all the ...”

“... have, more recently, been some letters to the Independent debating the rapper’s similarities to Byron, just as in her 1999 biography of Byron, Benita Eisler said the poet sometimes sounds like the first rap artist: he doesn’t. Even the Spectator has had an article in praise of Eminem (no doubt his attitudes ...”

“... chancellor to overrule himself. But Eldon was too pigheaded to do anything of the sort. And over Byron’s Don Juan in 1823, by giving advice to his vice-chancellor, who tried the case, he struck his third unwitting blow for free speech and the spread of radical literature among the working classes, in whom, Southey wrote, ...”

“... also liked to qualify and trim the literary verdicts which Europe had already handed down. Thus Byron had been overrated; and Goethe’s observations on Byron were manipulated by Arnold both to acknowledge a greatness and to set limits on it – a ‘splendid personality’ in poetry, but a slovenly artist and a childish ...”

“... misprints in the second edition, including an unfortunate mistake in a recipe for rice pudding. Byron objected to cuts in his work, as did David Livingstone, who also took exception to the ‘absolutely abominable’ illustrations of his Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa, in particular the scene of his own encounter with a lion: ‘Everyone ...”

“... to Claire, adopted Wollstonecraft’s birthday and Shelley’s idea of free love, and soon seduced Byron. The affair was disastrous for Claire, but inadvertently created the circumstances for her stepsister’s greatest success. In 1816, Mary, Claire and Shelley travelled to Switzerland to join Byron, who was reluctant to ...”

“... was published in 1937 as Letters from Iceland. It contained not only Auden’s ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, but also a number of other putative letters (to Richard Crossman and William Coldstream, for instance), MacNeice’s ‘Eclogue from Iceland’, the famously camp prose-piece ‘Hetty to Nancy’, and the joint-authored ‘Last Will and ...”

“... main session over, we were offered Judith Chernaik on Shelley’s feminism or Elma Dangerfield on Byron and Shelley or Marilyn Butler on the background to the politics of the Romantic poets. I had heard Judith a few times before, and reckoned Elma Dangerfield probably a bit right-wing for me, so I plumped for Marilyn Butler. After about two minutes I found ...”

“... well. The superstition, if it is one, had been around for five thousand years, Johnson said; when Byron quoted Johnson in Don Juan, he upped this to six thousand, concluding that ‘Whatever bar the reason rears/’Gainst such belief, there’s something stronger still/In its behalf, let those deny who will.’ The point perhaps concerns not so much the ...”

“... In Palazzo Mocenigo where he lived alone Lord Byron used every grand room To watch solitude mirror by mirror And the beauty of doors no one passed through He heard the marine murmurs of silence The lost echoes of steps in far corridors He loved the smooth shine on polished floors Shadows unrolling under high ceil ...”

“... my heart! The site below’s also closed where each year I’ve been to run my pen finger over Byron’s graffito, his name, carved on a column I can’t now get close to. For the last thirty years I’ve witnessed it fading. Each year it gets harder to find and decipher, illegible nearly from decades of neglect since he carved it with Hobhouse in 1809 ...”

“... readers it tends to be compared to Don Juan. This is understandable but misleading. Byron loved the Furioso, and imitated it by adapting certain of its aspects for his own purposes, as Tasso and Spenser had adapted other aspects of it to theirs. It is no slight to Byron to observe that his purposes were less ...”

“... his “poems”, his “living name”.’ Could a poet with any other name have done the same? Byron wrote ‘Byron’ on the temple metope, and Byron is the name invoked by everything he wrote, and in the breast of every admirer. Invoking Milton’s Satan, or Napoleon, or George III ...”

“... its private form. That in one sense was the objection of many of his most critical contemporaries. Byron, who seems to have been no great admirer of the earlier ‘unexcised’ Wordsworth who ‘seasoned his pedlar poems with democracy’, is even harder on the Stamp Distributor for Westmoreland which he became in 1813. By the time of Don Juan his name is an ...”