"'Least Like Saints': The Vexed Issue of Byron's Sexuality"

The Byron Journal, 2010

2008

This thesis will examine how the concepts of gender and nation were inextricably linked for Byron, and how this is demonstrated in his poetry through strategies of gendered embodiment. Byron’s complex relationship with and attitudes towards women displays an ambivalence that characterises his representations of England, due to his perception of the British body politic as a “gynocrasy.” This ambivalence was further exacerbated by Byron’s conception of his own masculinity as one in flux. His literary professionalisation and his status as an outmoded aristocrat contributed to these anxieties regarding his masculine subjectivity. Byron’s poetic fame was particularly influenced by the growing importance of women as readers, writers and arbiters of literary taste in early nineteenth century England. The first chapter will explore Byron’s anxiety about this increased influence of women as competitors and consumers in the literary marketplace, and how this threat manifests in his monstrous configurations of the female body and the body politic in his poetry. Chapter 2 investigates the tensions between Byron’s cosmopolitanism and patriotism in the context of his masculine subjectivity and demonstrates how these tensions shaped Byron’s first commercially successful work Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. This chapter also examines how Byron uses this masculine subjectivity in his Turkish Tales in order to assert the authority of his opinions on female sexuality and freedom over those expressed in female-authored works with similarly "exotic" themes. Chapter 3 addresses the post-exilic Byron and how his estrangement from England destabilises his conceptions of subjectivity and influences the poetics of the third canto of CHP. This chapter then goes on to track Byron’s recovery from this disintegration and traces how Byron’s poetic voice takes a new direction in his depictions of gender and nation. He begins to depend more heavily on allegory as a strategy of displacement for his feelings of nostalgia and homesickness and in order to place himself in a national literary tradition, as illustrated in his treatments of women and nation in Don Juan. The fourth and final chapter explores Byron’s feelings towards the domestic and commercial worlds both of which he held as bastions of female authority. Byron examines the ramifications of female influence through the heroines who use sexuality as an assertion of this power against a hapless Juan. This chapter will examine his poem The Island and the poems written just before his death in Greece to demonstrate conclusively how Byron’s struggles to recover his masculine subjectivity are persistently staged as contestations of space.

The Journal of Literature and Science, 2008

In Canto I of Byron's frequently bawdy epic Don Juan, following several stanzas about Wordsworth's poetic "transports" and Coleridge's lofty metaphysical speculations, we find our pubescent hero, gentle Juan, strolling pensively by "glassy brooks" and through "leafy nooks"-those parts of the natural world where "poets find materials for their books"-in an attempt to deal with his building sexual desire for Donna Julia (90). 1 The Byronic narrator depicts young Juan as lost in typically Romantic, abstract contemplation of "himself, and the whole earth, / Of man the wonderful, and of the stars," sublimely wondering "How many miles the moon might have in girth," and musing on the flight of "air balloons" (92): He poured upon the leaves, and on the flowers, And heard a voice in all the winds; and then He thought of wood-nymphs and immortal bowers, And how the goddesses came down to men: He missed the pathway, he forgot the hours, And when he looked upon his watch again, He found how much old Time had been a winner-He also found that he had lost his dinner. (94) One possible interpretation of the punch line of this episode is that since, as the narrator tells us earlier, "no one likes to be disturbed at meals / Or love" (89), Byron is suggesting that it is the body that yields the real satisfactions in life and not the metaphysical meanderings and eroticized, but wholly imaginative, communions with a surrogate lover found in nature. By condemning the tendency he sees among first generation Romantic poets to neglect the fundamental claims of the body, like shelter, warmth, and here, sex and food, Byron is making a comic argument in favor of the ultimate priority of these elemental, biological needs: if you attempt to spiritualize your desire too much, you go hungry and sexually unsatisfied. Although according to one critic, this scene is designed to show that it is "unprofitable in the midst of the spiritual and poetic to forget the physical", Byron may also be demonstrating that purely imaginative indulgence, if possible at all, requires that one ignores the otherwise persistent realities of bodily existence, which, as we will see, poses a significant and far less humorous problem for Byron than what he presents here. 2 The pensive, philosophical, poetic mind, possessed of "Longings sublime, and aspirations high" (93), must be cut off from its own real source of desire in the body: in this instance, the desire for sex qua sex. The narrator, in his typically 1 Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from Byron's poetry are taken from Byron: The Complete

European Romantic Review, 2011

International Journal of English Literature and Social Sciences, 2019

Sexuality is power." (Marquis de Sade) "It is only by sacrificing everything to sensual pleasure that this being known as Man, cast into the world in spite of himself, may succeed in sowing a few roses on the thorns of life." (Marquis de Sade)

2012

Author of the most influential long poem of its era (Childe Harold's Pilgrimage) and the funniest long poem in European literature (Don Juan), Lord Byron was also the literary superstar of Romanticism, whose effect on nineteenth-century writers, artists, musicians and politiciansbut also everyday readers-was second to none. His poems seduced and scandalized readers, and his life and legend were correspondingly magnetic, given added force by his early death in the Greek War of Independence. This introduction compresses his extraordinary life to manageable proportions, and gives readers a firm set of contexts in the politics, warfare and Romantic ideology of Byron's era. It offers a guide to the main themes in his wide-ranging oeuvre, from the early poems that made him famous (and infamous) overnight, to his narrative tales, dramas and the comic epic left incomplete at his death.

Groniek

Byron's Masks of Devotion This essay argues that Byron's devotion was religious, personal, and political. If the meaning of the word "devotion" extends from religious to secular objects, so too Byron's own life followed a trajectory from Scottish Presbyterianism to a poetical skepticism that found expression in Manfred, Cain, and Don Juan. Considered by Matthew Arnold to be one of two leading English Romantic poets (the other was Wordsworth), Byron devoted himself to Greek Independence and inspired democratic movements throughout Spain, Portugal, and Italy. George Gordon was an English poet, born in Scotland, who became Lord Byron at the tender age of ten. His first volume of poems, Fugitive Pieces and Hours of Idleness, were the work of an amateur aristocratic author. A harsh review by Henry Brougham in the Edinburgh Review, led him to lash out against his contemporaries in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809), a biting satire written in the style of heroic couplets and epigrammatic wit popularized by Alexander Pope. Two years abroad gave him experience of Portugal, Spain, Malta, Greece, and Albania, where he began Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, the poem that made him famous (1812). He wrote several Eastern tales, including "The Giaour", which inspired painters such as Eugene Delacroix, and wrote Manfred, Mazeppa, and his epic satire and masterpiece, Don Juan. Byron spent his final year aiding the Italian Carbonari in their struggles to liberate themselves from Austrian rule, and in Greece, to free that country from Turkish occupation. Byron died of fever in Messolonghi, Greece, inspiring many members of London Greek Committee to join the Philhellenic cause. Though born a Scottish Calvinist, Byron struggled with religious, poetic, and political forms of devotion, the three categories that form the subject of this essay. Byron's diverse expressions of devotion to women, poetry, friends and

2009

This article examines the handwritten notes Byron scribbled in 1816 in a copy of the fourth edition of his 1809 poem English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. It argues that these notes shed new light on both Byron's composition practice and the complex interplay the poet creates between fixed and unstable versions of his authorial identity. It also claims that the notes highlight the need for scholars to establish a more sensitive understanding of Romantic-period textual practices. Journal page: http://online.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/pdf/10.1353/byr.0.0061

Lord Byron, despite his writing being quite classical, is considered one of the most important Romantic poets, along with William Wordsworth and Samuel L. Coleridge. His works, however, differ in many aspects with the thematic that Wordsworth and Coleridge focused on in their poems, making himself distinct and easily recognized. Besides being famous for his longer, epic and nowadays canonical works, such as Manfred, Childe Harlod's Pilgrimage or Don Juan, he also earned his fame with his good looks, character and controversial life. It is said that he wrote his poems using the poem's personna to express his thoughts and beliefs and making the readers think that the speaker was actually a personification of himself, even if it was not the case, creating with this the Byronic Hero. This happened in the poems that were long enough to develop the character's personality carefully so that the readers could comprehend and follow his philosophy towards life, freedom, romantic passion and politics, in a more elaborated sense. Even though what was being represented did not fully coincide with Byron himself, he assured to make people believe that he was just like that and that he wrote in an autobiographical way. What it is known these days is that it is not completely true; he did express some ideas through his main characters, but contrasting information with his actual life and the letters he sent, parallel to his writings, we realize that actually what he did was sell an image of what he created, the so-called Byronic Hero. We must not forget that apart of his major, widely-known lengthy works, he also wrote shorter poems. In this paper I will argue that, in his shorter poems, since there is no character that can be used as a vehicle to express his thoughts, feelings and ideas, he uses the speaker's voice as an opportunity to let people know of his view of the world in an " indirect " way. First of all, we must talk about the Byronic Hero in isolation from Byron's poems. This hero is a variant of the Romantic Hero, which usually was a figure that disliked social norms and institutions, conventions and who was isolated from society because of external reasons or by his own desire. Often, the Byronic hero is someone temperamental by nature and/or passionate about a particular topic. He is also superior to the average man, emotionally and intellectually, which makes it hard for him to relate in a social environment without being arrogant, sarcastic, extremely self-conscious and sensitive. Some say that the Byronic hero is drawn to a point of nihilism that causes a rebellion against life itself, for his rejection of the established values and moral codes because they do not represent him. With this portrayal, the Byronic hero is a combination of repulsion and fascination, which is a mechanism to strongly attract the readers and feel curious about him.