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The Turbulent Reign of the
Stuarts and the Rise of the
English Novel
John Donne and the Metaphysical Poets
John Donne
Born in 1572 to a Catholic family, Donne was raised as a Roman Catholic. He was educated at Hart Hall, Oxford and Cambridge, but was not awarded a degree due to his Catholic faith. From 1589 to 1591, he traveled the continent. In 1592, he entered Lincoln's Inn as a law student. During this time, he frequented the theatre and social circles in London, becoming a "great visitor of ladies" and began writing poetry. His early love poems, such as Elegies and his five Satires, date back to the 1590s. As the years went on, the religious problem became more important for him, and in 1615 he took Holy Orders. King James appointed him a royal chaplain and forced Cambridge to grant him a degree. In 1617, his wife died, leaving an indelible mark on his soul.
Donne's poetry is characterized by:
The central theme of love, and sometimes even the love of God, which assumes a strongly physical, even erotic character. In the Holy Sonnets, the poet addresses himself to God, invoking his mercy in tones not far removed from those in which he addresses the woman he loves. Donne's love poems are where he finds his most powerful voice. English love poetry found its original identity with Spenser and Sidney, but Donne's choice was different. The title of the volume where his love poems are collected is "Songs and Sonnets," but none of the poems use the sonnet form; they are lyrics of varying length and metrical properties. The beloved is not the principal focus of the poem; instead, the center is the relationship the lover wishes to establish with her and the ways his amorous sentiment manifests itself. Donne's poetry has a dramatic dimension, with the lover and the beloved as protagonists of a sort of theatrical scene whose subject is one of the many possible faces of love. Donne and the poets influenced by him have been labeled "Metaphysical," as their wit consists in a combination of dissimilar images or the discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike, and they are very fond of conceits.
The Metaphysical Poets
The Metaphysical poets were "rediscovered" at the beginning of the 20th century, particularly due to the publication in 1921 of the volume "Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the 17th Century" edited by Herbert Grierson, and the essay published in that same year by T.S. Eliot, "The Metaphysical Poets."
George Herbert is considered less metaphysical than Donne.
The Poetry of George Herbert and Richard
Crashaw
George Herbert
He was ordained as a deacon in 1624 and became a Priest in 1630. During these years, he worked on poems that he sent to a friend, asking him to assess whether they were worthy of publication. Almost all his English poems were collected and published in a volume called The Temple (1633). The title gives an idea of an architectonic religious unity, in which every poem forms a part of the poetic edifice constructed by Herbert. In his poems, he represents 'a Picture of the many spiritual conflicts that have passed betwixt God's and his soul'. His conflicts do not have the same violent quality as Donne's. Herbert seeks a kind of simplicity that is not metaphysical in the sense of wit but is nevertheless subtle intellectually and often moving in a spiritual way.
Richard Crashaw
He converted to Catholicism in 1645 and ended his days in a minor office at the Santa Casa of Loreto. His principal work is Steps to the Temple (1646), which pays homage to Herbert only in the title. His point of reference is Marino and the Spanish mystics. His poetry is characterized by a profusion of metaphors and extravagant conceits, which place him in a decidedly baroque context. His poetry is distinguished by the intensity of religious feeling, the rhetorical skill, and the originality of imagery.
The Cavalier Poets
The term 'Cavalier Poets' is applied to a group of lyric poets whose poems about love and loyalty to King Charles I were distinguished by a lightness of tone, a graceful wit, and a tightly controlled form. Most of them were courtiers, except for one, Robert Herrick.
The first phase of the Civil War lasted from 1642 to 1646, and it resulted in the final defeat of Royalist troops. The contrast among the victors and between the House of Commons and the Army induced Charles to prompt the second phase of the Civil War, which was crushed by Oliver Cromwell, the General and leader of the Parliament forces. Charles I was charged with high treason and was sentenced to death, and he was executed on 30 January 1649. Britain became a republic, and Oliver Cromwell became the first Chairman of the Council of State of the new Republic. In 1653, Cromwell dissolved the Parliament, becoming the Lord Protector. The Puritans' revolutions had fossilized into a regime which kept in place many of the new ideas and formally affirmed them while denying their substance. In 1658, Cromwell's death led to his son Richard being declared Lord Protector, but he did not last long, and Parliament dismissed him in
In 1660, Charles (Charles I's son) was proclaimed King Charles II, and he enjoyed a nationwide surge of loyalty, but it soon subsided. His alliance with France was viewed with suspicion, and his relations with the Parliament were conflictual, leading him to dissolve it in 1681. Charles II's death led to his brother James II succeeding him, and James II was openly Catholic, autocratic, and hostile to the Parliament, leading to his deposition by the Parliament in 1688. The throne then went to his daughter Mary and her husband. The Puritans' Revolutions, also known as the "Great Revolutions," gave rise to the world's first constitutional monarchy, where the King could no longer be an absolute ruler, and the Parliament became the centre of national political life. The government became the result of a social contract between the King and his people, represented in Parliament, and this mainly involved the bourgeoisie, who had been the protagonist of English social and economic life since the beginning of the century and were now prepared to conquer a decisive role in social and cultural life.
Andrew Marvell
Andrew Marvell was an earnest student of the classics and the author in 1650 of a Horatian Ode dedicated to Cromwell. After the Restoration, he wrote satires both in prose and in verse, and for a long time, he was remembered as a satirist. His lyric poetry, however, has entered the Canon of English poetry after the rediscovery of the Metaphysical by Grierson and Eliot. His poetry possesses a rhetorical virtuosity and a wit surpassed only by Donne. Sometimes the theme is the simple beauty of nature, but the contemplation of nature produces a complex web of reflections on the emotions, the passions, and the anxieties intrinsic to the human condition.
His most famous poem is "To His Coy Mistress," which explores the theme of carpe diem (seize the day). Marvell plays ironically with the concept of time, with the endless wait which the loved one imposes on his desire, but time passes inexorably, leading toward death when "her beauty shall no more be found" and she will be in her grave. The wit and irony are pure Marvell, as is the tone of the verses that follow the erotic invitation issued to the loved one so that together they may "devour" time rather than "languish" in its power.
John Milton
John Milton is a central protagonist of English culture and literature, and he devoted his life to becoming a great poet, an interpreter of his times, and the voice that spoke to the British nation to illustrate to it the divine message. The parallel study of the classic and the sacred texts was for him the necessary basis for the formation of the intellectual. His responsibility was to be an active presence, and he put forward the idea of assuming a role which today would be called that of the committed intellectual. While at the University, he wrote several poems and oratorical exercises in Latin, but also poems in Italian and English. The study of the forms and genres of "high literature" was not for reproducing them; on the contrary, his attention was to subvert them to separate the aristocratic culture with which they were associated. This project is present in the pastoral elegy Lycidas, and he had already performed a similar operation in Comus, which was a masque, the aristocratic genre par excellence. Milton's religious convictions were central both to his personal life and to his poetry. In 1638-1639, he spent time in Italy, the land of artistic creation, and he met many musicians and men of letters in the home of the humanist culture which had been such an important part of his formation. Back in London, his attention turned towards the political conflicts which opposed Parliament to the King and the bishops, and he wrote a series of works on various religious and political subjects, turning himself into a passionate defender of the principles of liberty. He published several pamphlets against the institution of bishops, and his most radical political work is The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649), an essay that justifies the execution of Charles I. In the following years, Milton's literary activity consisted above all in the writing of political pamphlets, and he also wrote several sonnets, most of them on public themes, with only a few being personal. After the collapse of the Protectorate, he published a courageous defense of the republican cause, The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, and his liberty and his life were in danger for a while. After he was released, he was able to dedicate himself to the composition of Paradise Lost, which he had probably started before the Restoration.
couplet (a pair of rhyming verses of ten syllables) as the preferred meter for tragedy.
John Dryden's Contributions
John Dryden was a figure of immense importance in English cultural life in the second half of the 17th century. His early major works were "Heroique Stanzas" (1659) on the death of Cromwell and "Astrea Redux" (1660) to celebrate the return of the King. His poetry often addressed great political events and questions of politics and religion, but he should be seen as a moderate who spoke up for whoever seemed most likely to guarantee peace and stability. In "Annus Mirabilis," he recalled the Fire of London and the victory against the Dutch, and he was later given the title of Poet Laureate. In 1687, he published "The Hind and the Panther," a poem in which he criticized the Anglican Church and illustrated his theological conviction that truth is achievable only through absolute faith. He remained Catholic for his entire life. Dryden also produced excellent translations of Latin poets and compiled a volume of translations of Ovid, Boccaccio, and Chaucer under the title "Fables Ancient and Modern," published in 1700.
Dryden's Dramatic Works
Dryden's first plays were verse and prose comedies, with the heroic couplet as his chosen meter. The same meter was used in the tragedy "The Indian Emperor," where the subject matter was similar to that treated by Ariosto in his "Orlando Furioso": love, honor, duty, and loyalty as the values that should inspire the actions of the characters. This type of tragedy, called "Heroic Tragedy," was appreciated by the elite public of the time as it coincided with the self-image they wished to project to the world. The only one of Dryden's tragedies to have survived in the stage repertory is "All for Love" (1678), which is written in blank verse instead of the rhyme scheme.
Dryden's Notable Comedies
Dryden produced two important comedies, though their titles are not provided in the given text.
Restoration Comedy
Marriage à la Mode (1672)
Calls into question the institution of marriage in a brutally open-minded fashion
Entirely in alignment with the attitudes present in aristocratic and courtly circles, as well as the majority of the public for Restoration theatre.
Amphitryon (1690)
A comedy harshly criticized for its "coarseness" Full of formidable examples of "wit" which Restoration comedy considered the most desirable quality in its characters and authors Dryden regarded comedy as an inferior genre, yet it provided him with some of the most felicitous moments of his artistic production.
Restoration Comedies
Various types: political themes, some of the Spanish inspiration, imitations of Molière New type: London comedy Subject: world of the metropolitan high society, featuring young gentlemen and ladies of that social group Ordinary citizens of the City were treated with scorn as they were representative of the social stratum that had eagerly supported the Puritans Revolution and the regime of Oliver Cromwell
Comedy of Manners
Characterized by a satire on the customs and manners of the day and mockery of the attitudes, behaviour and values of the London beau monde The fop is the particular object of ridicule His fault is his lack of proportion, his excess, which is seen as something negative in itself but can be used to reveal the limits and the total inconsistency of the values shared by all His defect is an affectation, but individual plays concentrate on a particular type of affectation by which the fop is characterized and defined The fop's other outstanding defect is his belief that he is a wit, the virtue par excellence of the heroes and heroines Wit becomes a linguistic ability in linking together concepts and ideas The verbal fireworks constitute the claim to the distinction of its characters, the measure of their credit and their honour The point of reference of all these plays was London, and people from the countryside were shown as clumsy and ridiculous
George Etherege
Opened with The Comical Revenge, a comedy whose story develops through four interlinked plots, each corresponding to a different language She Would Is She Could was his next play, a London comedy The Man of Mode was his last play, a comedy of manners
After a period serving as an officer in the Grenadiers, he returned to the stage with a lively and carefree comedy, The Recruiting Officer, based on his experience in the army His masterpiece is The Beaux' Stratagem, where the action takes place in a provincial town, and the stratagem of the title consists in the fact that two young men have decided to 'explore' the provinces in a search of an heiress to marry, each taking his turn to pass as the other's servant Farquhar picks up on Milton's pamphlet on divorce, and takes advantage of the rights of authorial fantasy to imagine a moral and 'modern' resolution to the story Most of his comedies are comedies of manner
Conclusion
Comedies of manner use the typical figures and topoi universal in comedy but root them in their own time, enriching them with precise characteristics belonging to the historical reality of the Restoration period They place at the centre of their stories relations between the sexes, both amorous and institutional The idea of Eros as a liberatory value has meant that their adventures are as enjoyable and morally acceptable for modern audiences as they were for audiences at the time The pleasure that audiences continue to take in these comedies derives from the fact that they offer spectators a dream of how they would like to be Marriage as an institution is the object of radical satire The restoration dramatists may belong to the old aristocratic world which is holding out against the new bourgeois one, but their critique uncovers the faults and failings of the emerging order They denounce marriages of interest presented as a cause of falsity and unhappiness, while offering images of marriages of love that assert the principle that marital choice must not be imposed by the parents but made freely by the children Restoration dramatists often force reality, inventing a corner of the world in which love overcomes every obstacle, but even here they underline the need to temper amorous enthusiasm with an awareness of the difficulties of married life It is as if the comic writers of the Restoration wished to carve out a space where they could give a voice to the hope for a better world where present reality could be contrasted with the dream of a universe in which hypocrisy and the power of money were conquered and annihilated.
Daniel Defoe and the Rise of the English
Novel
Defoe's Background and Writings
Daniel Defoe was a versatile writer, engaging in various professions such as hosiery merchant, wine and tobacco merchant, and political journalist. He traveled extensively in Europe and Britain, gathering political information for the statesman Robert Harley. Defoe was a Dissenter, which meant he was denied most civil rights due to his religious beliefs that differed from the Church of England. In 1702, he published a pamphlet called "The Shortest Way with the Dissenters," where he ironically proposed the radical suppression of dissent, for which he was imprisoned and put in the pillory. Defoe's political writings defended principles of modernity, such as the absolute sovereignty of the people, the benefits of foreigners to the nation, the importance of education, and the capitalist ethos.
Defoe's Fictional Works
Defoe's most famous fictional works include Robinson Crusoe, Roxana, Or the Fortunate Mistress, Captain Singleton, The Journal of the Plague Year, and Moll Flanders. Defoe's language in his novels was very different from the language of romances, using the idiom of preachers, journalists, and the common people, with a focus on liveliness, concreteness, and words that all potential readers would understand. Defoe's main concern in his novels was to create a series of events, encounters, misfortunes, and surprises to keep the reader's interest in the protagonist's fate. While Defoe's characters may express emotions, there is a lack of in- depth character psychology in his works. Despite this, Defoe's protagonists, such as Robinson, Moll, and Roxanna, are among the most memorable creations in the history of the English novel.
The Rise of the English Novel
The English novel is considered the literary genre of the rising bourgeoisie, as it expresses the values shared by the middle-class reading public, such as a deep interest in the individual self and the material world. The revolutionary feature of the novel is its closeness to the reader, presenting curious and unusual events that are recognized as belonging to the reader's own world. The first English novelists narrated the life and adventures of characters from the real world, telling "true" stories that aimed to promote the values expressed by the characters or the plot.
Fielding's novels, such as "Tom Jones", are characterized by a stylish and entertaining narrative, filled with highly comic episodes and maintained by the irony and humor of the characters and events. Fielding declares his presence as the narrator, explicitly reminding the reader that they are reading a novel, and situates his work within the consecrated genres of classical literature, defining it as a "comic epic poem in prose".
Smollett's Caustic Anti-Conformism
Smollett's novels, such as "The Adventures of Roderick Random" and "The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle", feature protagonists who recount a long series of adventures similar to those found in earlier picaresque novels, while also incorporating elements drawn from the author's own experiences. Smollett's "Peregrine Pickle" contains numerous digressions, including a scandalous chapter with the erotic reminiscences of a real-life figure, Viscountess Vane, which did not help the novel's success. Smollett's "Humphry Clinker" is an epistolary novel that describes the various effects produced on different members of the same family by the same objects, reflecting the Stoic philosophical assertion that things are not what they are, but what we believe them to be. Smollett's work is characterized by his caustic anti-conformism, as he aims to arouse "generous indignation... against the sordid and vicious disposition of the world".
Sterne's Subversive Experimentation
Sterne's "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy" represents a significant break with convention, as it purports to be about "opinions" rather than adventures. The novel openly declares its fictional character and presents the author as the creator of the novelistic universe, constantly addressing the reader in a witty, amused, and gracefully satirical tone. Sterne exploits the relativity of time as experienced by humans, interrupting the chronological sequence with a thousand digressions and recounting the lives of other people around the narrator, Tristram. Sterne's experimentation with form and language is truly subversive, as he explores and takes apart every figure of rhetoric and form of professional language, while also employing various non-verbal devices, such as asterisks and blank pages, to reinforce the fictional nature of the work. Sterne's "A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy" presents a sentimental account of the narrator's lingering over particulars, details, and little episodes, which aligns with the philosophy and taste that were to come to the fore in the second half of the 18th century.
The Age of Sensibility
Sensibility, the capacity to feel, became a key term in English culture during the second half of the 18th century.
In poetry, sensibility expressed itself in a sombre view of the place of man in the world, with the hymn to human achievements giving way to considerations of mortality and meditations on death.
The Emergence of Pre-Romantic Poetry
Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"
The masterpiece of 18th-century melancholic sensibility is Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard." The Elegy, written in quatrains rhymed abab and traditional in form, is a meditation on death, focusing on the rural poor buried in miserable graves, lacking the ornaments and statues that grace the graves of the rich and powerful. Their obscure existence finds its dark resting place under the "rugged elms" and the "yew-tree's shade" of the country churchyard. The Elegy was a decisive landmark in the emergence of "grave poetry," a fundamental component of pre-Romanticism.
The Sublime in Pre-Romantic Poetry
Gray is also the author of "The Bard," in which the words of a surviving bard provide Gray with the opportunity to align his poetry with the idea of the Sublime. The Sublime is a central idea of pre-Romantic poetry, assigning aesthetic value to the grandeur and violence of nature and its savage aspects, seen as able to arouse the deepest emotions, from religious awe to aghast terror. In his "Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful," Edmund Burke emphasizes terror as a source of aesthetic pleasure, providing a theoretical basis for the manifestation of a form of taste that became increasingly widespread.
The Primitive and the "Natural" in Pre-Romantic Poetry
Gray's "The Bard" also displays another fundamental aspect of pre- Romantic sensibility, connected to the idea of the primitive, the spontaneous, and the "natural." James Macpherson translated a Gaelic fragment and produced a book called "Fragments of Ancient Poetry," which he claimed consisted of material he had collected in the Highlands and translated from the original. Gaelic poetry came to be acclaimed as the sublime manifestation of natural poetic genius across Europe. The ancient poems translated by Thomas Chatterton were equally spurious, but his death, along with his poetry, had a powerful effect on the Romantic poets, who made much of the primitivism of the poems he was supposed to have translated.
His "Lives of the English Poets," published in 1779-81, covered the period from Milton to his contemporaries, offering judgments expressed with clarity, coherence, and literary and linguistic sensibility. Johnson's "Preface" to his edition of the Works of Shakespeare reflects his sense of Shakespeare's texts as a vehicle for performance, tied to the conception of Nature characteristic of the second half of the 18th century.
Goldsmith and Sheridan
Oliver Goldsmith
Oliver Goldsmith, born in Ireland, settled in London and became a friend of Johnson, who saved him from being cast into the debtors' prison. Goldsmith's first play, "The Good-Natured Man," made reference to the optimistic hope in benevolence professed by sentimental comedy, but his language had verve, wit, and a sense of humor lacking in the theatre of the day. With his next play, "She Stoops to Conquer," Goldsmith demonstrated how it was possible to combine sensibility and laughter, creating a plot full of farcical elements and humorous subtleties while maintaining psychological consistency.
Richard Brinsley Sheridan
Richard Brinsley Sheridan, born in Dublin, was a member of Parliament with modern ideas and a formidable parliamentary orator. As a playwright/manager, he ended his career with the adaptation of a German drama, "Pizarro," which denounced the massacres and wickedness of the Spanish colonists and involved spectacular scenes. His previous works, "The Rivals" and "The School for Scandal," have remained in the English theatrical repertory. "The Rivals" is a play with youthful gaiety and ebullience, while "The School for Scandal" targets Lady Sneerwell and her fellow scandalmongers, with the wittiest lines belonging to the negative characters.
The Three Revolutions
During the second half of the 18th century, a massive process of transformation of the economy took place, going from an agrarian and handicraft economy to an industrial one based on machine manufacture. This Industrial Revolution transformed the face of Britain and made it the greatest industrial power in the world, but it was also a cultural revolution that forced thousands of men and women to radically change their habits, customs, social relations, and the very way they saw their lives and the meaning of life in general.
The American Revolution and the
Transformation of Britain
The Impact of the American Revolution and the French
Revolution
The American Revolution and the loss of the American colonies did not halt or even seriously affect the process of transformation in Britain. While conservatives naturally took sides against the "rebels", some intellectuals saw in the principles of the American Revolution the practical realisation of the liberal ideal that they could share.
The whole population of Britain had to come to terms with the implications of the French Revolution, which offered too many of the disinherited victims of the Industrial Revolution a hope of salvation. In the early years of the Revolution, a part of the establishment had also looked with a sympathetic eye at developments in France. However, before long attitudes changed radically: in 1793, Britain went to war with France, in defence of the balance of power in Europe but also internal political and social harmony.
The Debate between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine
As early as 1790, Edmund Burke published his "Reflections on the Revolution in France", whose immediate purpose was an attack on those who supported the ideals on which the Revolution was founded, but whose fire ideologically was directed against proponents of the rights of man. The most influential of these was Thomas Paine, the author of various pamphlets inciting resistance against Great Britain and supporting the struggle for independence. Paine responded to Burke with the essay "The Rights of Man", one of the most brilliant political treatises and a milestone of democratic thought. Paine defended the French Revolution, and in the second part of the essay he put forward a progressive political programme that proposed popular education, pensions for the aged, and public work for the unemployed to be financed by a progressive income tax. As a result, Paine was indicted for treason but he managed to escape to France before being arrested. Paine was declared an outlaw and his essay was ordered to be destroyed.
The Romantic Poets and the Revolutionary Climate
The young poets of the Romantic movement came to maturity in this climate of unprecedented upheaval, enthusiasm, fear, hope and delusion.
William Blake
Blake's Life and Works
Blake was apprenticed to an engraver at the age of 14 and then attended the Royal Academy. For the rest of his life, he was an engraver, engraving most
Coleridge's Supernatural Poetry
Coleridge's poetry sets out to describe incidents and "characters supernatural, or at least romantic", so as to arouse in readers the emotions they would have experienced if they had been in the presence of the events portrayed, as in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner".
Wordsworth's Poetry of Everyday Life
Wordsworth concerned himself with incidents and agents belonging to the life of every day, endowing them with "the charm of novelty" by means of "the modifying colours of imagination". He aimed to give a voice to the class of "have never known false refinements", like the mother in "The Idiot" or the little girl in "We Are Seven".
Tintern Abbey and the Ode on Intimations of Immortality
"Tintern Abbey" is the first grandiose example of Romantic nature poetry, where nature is the mistress and guide of the man who can observe her, enabling him to better understand himself and humanity as a whole. The "Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" describes the poet's sense of loss faced with time, while the second and third sections illustrate and reconcile both resistance to and acceptance of growth.
Wordsworth's Later Years and The Prelude
In the following years, Wordsworth wrote several new poems in which he tried to revive the happy creative process that had given rise to his previous lyrical compositions. He also devoted his energies to reshaping poems he had written before, in particular "The Prelude", a reflection on his formation designed as a prelude to "The Excursion". However, Wordsworth had distanced himself from his former self, transforming into a staunch conservative and a loyal believer in the Church of England.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The "Demonic Group" and the "Conversational Group"
Alongside the "Demonic Group" of poems, including "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", "Christabel" and "Kubla Khan", Coleridge also worked on a group of poems in a totally different mode, the "Conversational Group", where the poet, in the quiet of his Devon cottage, returns in his thoughts to his schooldays in London and imagines a happy future for his child.
Coleridge's Intellectual Achievements
Politically, Coleridge was a youthful enthusiast for the French Revolution and its ideals of liberty, from which he got the impulse for his theory of the nature of poetic creation, based on a distinction between Imagination and
Fancy. In the last years of his life, he addressed himself in an original way to the social problems created by the harsh conditions of the time, combining conservatism with a Christian radicalism.
George Gordon Byron
Byron became 'Lord Byron' at the age of ten after the death of his grandfather. He was educated at Harrow public school and at Cambridge, where he became known for his radicalism and loose living rather than his scholarly attainments.
The Early Life and Works of Lord Byron
Hours of Idleness and English Bards and Scotch Reviewers
Lord Byron's first collection of poems, "Hours of Idleness," was published in 1807 and received a negative critique in the Edinburgh Review. This criticism, however, inspired him to write a satirical poem in imitation of Pope, titled "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers." This work revealed Byron's talent as a versifier and contained his sarcastic dismissal of the Romantic poets of the first generation, whom he ridiculed for having abandoned their youthful ideals and lost their creative impulse.
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
After his "Grand Tour" of Portugal, Spain, Albania, and Greece, Byron began work on the poem that would make him famous, "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage." The first two cantos were published in 1812, followed by Canto III in 1816 and Canto IV in 1818. The first two cantos were a sort of verse diary of Byron/Harold's travels in the Mediterranean countries he had visited, while Canto III describes the pilgrim's journey to the Low Countries and the Alps. The protagonist, Harold, is a melancholic and cynical figure who also serves as an accuser of the despotic European powers and a champion of the freedom of the Greek people oppressed by Turkish rule. At this point, the poet abandons the device of the pilgrim and speaks directly to the reader, emerging as a living Romantic hero, a synthesis of German Romanticism and English Gothic taste, enriched by his personal vision of the hero who challenges the laws of God and man in the name of freedom.
Byronic Hero and Manfred
The events of Byron's life contributed to the creation of his romantic image, as he became the scandalous protagonist of illicit love affairs, homosexual passions, and incestuous relations, resulting in hostility and condemnation from the British establishment. After leaving England in 1816, he published several verse tales, generally with an oriental setting, featuring variants on the figure of the Byronic hero. This manifestation is seen in the dramatic poem "Manfred," written between 1816 and 1817, which Byron began in Geneva and finished in Venice.
