Conversations with Gavin Hopps

Two virtual (because of the Covid pandemic) and virtually unedited conversations between Bernard Beatty and Gavin Hopps about this book. They are not like a chapter in a book, and do not have an argument that can be summarized, but they take in turn the business of reading Byron's poetry, then his life and then his politics. Dr Hopps asks about the convergence/divergence between the views of Bernard Beatty and Jerome McGann, Byron's use of voice, his seriousness and difficulty, his concern with aftermath, the relation between Byron's poems and his life, the role of conversation, and some of the difficulties of making Byron intelligible to a world which seems content with an absurdly simplifying image of him.