A Guide to Byron’s Verse in Fifty Poems

Abstract This book aims to extend our understanding of Lord Byron’s poetry—as opposed to his life and legend—by offering fifty very short discussions of his best poems, be they lyrics, four cantos of poetic travelogue in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, narrative poems set in the Middle East and elsewhere, dramas (neoclassical, Faustian, or biblical), satires, love songs, or the seventeen cantos of his comic epic, Don Juan. Every item, long or short, gets the same length of treatment (though the three iterations of Childe Harold and the seven iterations of Don Juan are treated separately, so that these supreme works get the attention they deserve). The coverage is wide, from the very beginning of Byron’s career in Nottinghamshire to its very end in Greece, and the approach is accessible, giving readers something to think about rather than telling them what to think, without ‘explaining poems away’. The focus is sometimes biographical, sometimes historical, sometimes generic, sometimes formalist, but always the texts are chosen on the basis of their quality, first and foremost. The book is designed to be dipped into, or read from cover to cover, as the reader prefers—and, of course, the choice of Byron’s fifty best things will itself promote discussion of a poet who deserves to stand just behind Shakespeare alongside Chaucer, Milton, Pope, and Wordsworth as a central figure in English verse.