Selected Poems

by Byron

  Who kill’d John Keats?

  A squib in a letter of July 1821; first published in Moore, 1830. Byron had used the key rhyme in Don Juan I in his mock complaint about the way Scotch reviews and the ‘Quarterly/Treat a dissenting author very martyrly‘ (stanza CCXI).

  In April 1821, a dismayed Shelley reported to Byron, ‘Young Keats… died lately at Rome from the consequences of breaking a blood-vessel, in paroxysms of despair at the contemptuous attack on his book [Endymion, 1818] in the Quarterly Review.’ He was misinformed: Keats was stung, but not fatally, by the reviews; it was tuberculosis that killed him in February 1821. Byron was frankly incredulous: ‘is it actually true? I did not think criticism had been so killing… Poor fellow!… in this world of bustle and broil, and especially in the career of writing, a man should calculate upon his powers of resistance before he goes into the arena’ (26 April 1821; BLJ, Vol. 8, p. 103). More snidely, he wrote to Murray in the letter containing these verses that the who would die of an article in a review – would probably have died of something else equally trivial’ (BLJ, Vol. 8, pp. 162–3). The other writers mentioned in these verses are Henry Milman, a poet, ecclesiastical scholar and vicar (‘Jew Milman’ Byron called him elsewhere; BLJ, Vol. 8, p. 228); John Barrow, a travel writer who published frequently in the Quarterly Review; and the poet laureate Robert Southey, whom Shelley (wrongly) suspected as the Quarterly executioner. An elegy on Keats that Byron did publish, in Canto XI of Don Juan (1823), proved so quotable that it gained an immediate and lasting influence, at least equal to that of Shelley’s Adonais: ‘John Keats… was killed off by one critique,/Just as he really promised something great,/… Poor fellow! His was an untoward fate: – ’Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle,/Should let itself be snuffed out by an Article’ (stanza LX).

  THE BLUES: A Literary Eclogue

  Written August 1821. The piece was too short for Murray to publish separately, and he frustrated Byron by holding on to it for two years, after which Byron gave it to the Hunts, who published it in April 1823 as the front piece in the third issue of the Liberal. Its reception was affected by reviewers’ political abuse of the Liberal, and it was not reprinted until 1831, in the first edition of the collected Works.

  The title refers to the ‘Bluestockings’, a derisive term for women, primarily from the professional and upper-middle classes, who, instead of confining themselves to the routine female gatherings for card-playing, frivolous ‘accomplishments’ and gossip, attended intellectual and literary salons (the name derived from one of the literary lions often invited to read works or lecture to these salons, Benjamin Stillingfleet, who wore blue rather than the customary white stockings of male dress). Such salons developed in the mid eighteenth century; Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the ‘Queen of the Blues’, founded the first; others in attendance included Elizabeth Robinson Montagu, Elizabeth Carter, Elizabeth Vesey, Hester Chapone and Frances Boscawen. Because women were typically denied higher education and never admitted to universities, these clubs were a vital resource for their intellectual life, and helped to bring a number of women writers into the literary culture. In Byron’s day, the two women writers most associated with this culture were Hannah More and Anna Laetitia Barbauld. Byron despised both.

  Jerome J. McGann gives a plausible key to Byron’s characters (CPW, Vol. 6, pp. 665–6): Inkel is Byron himself; Tracy is Moore; Miss Lilac is Byron’s estranged wife, the mathematical Annabella Milbanke; Scamp is Coleridge (the scene is Coleridge’s London lectures of 1811–12, some of which Byron attended; Hazlitt’s 1818 lectures may also figure in the representation); Botherby is William Sotheby, a minor poet and man of letters; the Bluebottles are Byron’s friends and political mentors, Lord and Lady Holland; Lady Bluemount is Lady Beaumont, a friend of Wordsworth (‘Wordswords’), whose poetry Byron ridicules along with that of other Lake poets, in particular Southey (‘Mouthey’). The epigraph is from Virgil’s Eclogue II: ‘Do not believe too much in colouring,’ the shepherd Corydon moans in solitude to the beautiful boy Alexis, whom he adores, but who has rejected him for his own master, who also adores him.

  Don Juan and Beppo include other parodies and lampoons of the Blues (see Jerome J. McGann’s list, CPW, Vol. 6, p. 666). Byron told Murray that he ‘scratched off’ this eclogue as ‘a mere buffoonery – to quiz [ridicule] “the Blues” ’, and he sarcastically urged him to publish it ‘anonymously… don’t let my name out – for the present – or I shall have all the old women in London about my ears – since it sneers at the solace of their antient Spinsterstry’ (7 August; BLJ, Vol. 8, p. 172). The contempt, as well as the linking of female intelligence to sexual frustration, was a common tone; the general commentary and the parodies and satires in which it sounds are impressive for crossing the class lines that mark other social antipathies. Dr Johnson called the Bluestockings ‘Amazons of the pen’ (The Adventurer, December 1753); Moore wrote a comic operetta titled M.P. or The BlueStocking (1811), which lampooned the pretensions and clumsy arts of scientific women; Keats ‘detest[ed]’ these women for their lack of ‘real feminine Modesty’, despised the thought of his being read by them (letter, 21 September 1817), and longed to upset the ‘drawling bluestocking world’ (letter, 14 August 1819); Hazlitt expressed his ‘utter aversion’ to them (Table-Talk XXIII, ‘On Great and Little Things’). There were a few late revisions of this discourse: in 1827, William P. Scargil’s BlueStocking Hall praised literary women; a decade later, as a complement to his all-male Feast of the Poets, Leigh Hunt celebrated them in BlueStocking Revels; or, The Feast of the Violets, suggesting that the colour be redeemed as ‘viole’ for women, and that ‘blue‘ henceforth be ‘confined to the masculine, vain, and absurd’.

  THE VISION OF JUDGMENT

  Written 20 September-4 October 1821; Byron sent Murray The Vision of Judgment on 4 October, but Murray, alarmed by the outcry over the blasphemy of Don Juan (1819) and Cain, published in December 1821, hesitated, and in July 1822 Byron withdrew it. The poem was printed anonymously in the first number of the Liberal (15 October 1822), the journal on which Byron collaborated with Leigh Hunt and Percy Shelley. The reviews were hostile, and John Hunt, the publisher, was found guilty of lèse-majesté in 1824 (Byron’s estate paid the £100 damages).

  George III died on 29 January 1820; on 11 April 1821 Robert Southey, the poet laureate, published A Vision of Judgement, recounting in unrhymed hexameters the poet’s vision of the dead king’s ascent to Heaven, where he confounds his former antagonists, John Wilkes and ‘Junius’ (today thought to be Philip Francis), pseudonymous author of letters (1769–71) attacking the government, is welcomed by former monarchs of England and great figures of English history, and reunited with his family. To Byron, Southey’s Vision exemplified the worst of the Lake School: bad verse defended upon ‘system’, and turncoat politics, further displayed in the fulsome dedication to George IV. The pirated publication in 1817 of Southey’s radical drama of 1794, Wat Tyler, made clear the reversal of the laureate’s revolutionary youth. Byron determined to ‘put the said George’s Apotheosis in a Whig point of view, not forgetting the Poet Laureate for his preface and his other demerits’ (BLJ, Vol. 8, p. 229). In his Preface Southey declared that the ‘publication of a lascivious book is one of the worst offences which can be committed against the well-being of society’, and denounced the men ‘of diseased hearts and depraved imaginations’ who made up what he termed ‘the Satanic school’, concluding: ‘Let rulers of the state look to this, in time!’ Byron, already angry in his conviction that Southey had spread rumours about his conduct in Switzerland (see note to Manfred), could not miss the allusion. He began a rejoinder on 7 May, but laid it aside, instead condemning Southey’s ‘cowardly ferocity’ and ‘impious impudence’ in a note to The Two Foscari, published 19 December 1821. To this Southey replied in a letter to the Courier on 5 January, not knowing that his counsel, ‘when he attacks me again let it be in rhyme’, had been anticipated by Byron’s return to his poem in late September. In si
gning himself ‘Quevedo Redivivus‘ Byron invoked as precedent Francisco Gomez de Quevedo y Villegas, the Spanish satirist whose Sueños attacked the court corruption of his day. The influence of Paradise Lost, by way of parody as well as allusion, is apparent throughout. Byron’s Vision follows Southey’s in citing some of the king’s chief opponents, John Wilkes (ll. 521–68), ‘Junius’ (ll. 593–668), and two writers Byron’s contemporaries thought might be hiding behind the pseudonym (l. 631), Edmund Burke and John Horne Tooke, a radical philologist.

  Southeys appearance in his own poem invited Byron to follow suit, having Southey expose himself as ‘a pen of all work’ (1. 797), the indiscriminate author of the radical Wat Tyler, the conservative Battle of Blenheim (1800) and The Poet’s Pilgrimage to Waterloo (1816) (1. 768), and a Life (1820) of the Methodist John Wesley (1.. 785). The scorn is the aristocra’s for the professional author (see note to Beppo). At the same time, Byron avoids the presumption for which he berates Southey in the Preface, of ‘deal[ing] about his judgments in the next world’. In contrast to Southey’s apotheosis, in his Vision George III ‘slipp’d’ into heaven: the hundredth psalm that he is ‘practising’ at the conclusion praises the Lord’s everlasting mercy (11. 846–8).

  Epigraph: The Merchant of Venice (IV.i.222, 340).

  Criticism: Malcolm Kelsall, Byron’s Politics, on the Whig heritage of the poem, and Stuart Peterfreund, ‘The Politics of “Neutral Space” ’, on the contemporary context; William H. Marshall on the Liberal; Emrys Jones, ‘Byron’s Visions of Judgement’, on the literary traditions; Peter T. Murphy, ‘Visions of Success’, on metre, poetry and politics in the two Visions and Byron’s Cain; and Andrew Rutherford, Byron: A Critical Study, who acclaims the Vision as ‘Byron’s masterpiece’; on the shifty dynamics around the notion of ‘Author’, see Susan J. Wolfson in The Cambridge Companion to Lord Byron, ed. Drummond Bone.

  On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year

  Written 22 January 1824; published in the Morning Chronicle 29 October 1824, collected in the 1831 Works.

  On the day it was written Byron gave a copy of this poem, the last entry in his Missolonghi journal, to Pietro Gamba; widely published in the newspapers after Byron’s death on 19 April, it significantly influenced the image of his last days.

  Criticism: Jerome J. McGann, ‘Shall These Bones Live?’; on the poem as Byron’s confession of love for his page, Loukas Chalandritsanos, see Louis Crompton, Byron and Greek Love, pp. 318–28.

  WORKS CITED IN THE NOTES

  Byron

  BLJ. Byron ’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 12 vols., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press/London: John Murray, 1973–82.

  CMP. Lord Byron: The Complete Miscellaneous Prose, ed. Andrew Nicholson, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.

  CPW. Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann, 7 vols.; Vol. 6 coedited with Barry Weller, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–93.

  Works. The Works of Lord Byron: With His Letters and Journals, and His Life, by Thomas Moore, Esq., 17 vols., London: John Murray, 1832–4.

  Contemporary Reviews and Documents

  Most of the reviews cited may be found in the collections listed Further Reading. Other works cited are:

  BCH. Byron: The Critical Heritage, ed. Andrew Rutherford, New York: Barnes and Noble/London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970.

  Thomas Moore, Letters and Journals of Lord Byron: With Notices of His Life, London: John Murray, 1830.

  Critical Works

  Short titles are given for works already listed in Further Reading.

  T.L. Ashton, Byron ’s Hebrew Melodies, Austin: University of Texas Press/London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972.

  Frederick L. Beaty, ‘Byron and Francesca da Rimini’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 75 (1960), pp. 395–401.

  — Byron the Satirist, DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1985.

  Bernard Blackstone, Byron: A Survey, London: Longman, 1975.

  William A. Borst, Lord Byron ’s First Pilgrimage, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948.

  Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglass, eds., A Selection of Hebrew Melodies, Ancient and Modern, by Isaac Nathan and Lord Byron, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1988.

  E.M. Butler, Byron and Goethe, London: Bowes & Bowes, 1956.

  Marilyn Butler, ‘John Bull’s Other Kingdom: Byron’s Intellectual Comedy’, Studies in Romanticism 31 (1992), pp. 281–95.

  — ‘The Orientalism of Byron’s Giaour’, in Byron and the Limits of Fiction, ed. Bernard Beatty and Vincent Newey, Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1988.

  Samuel C. Chew, Jr., The Dramas of Lord Byron: A Critical Study (1915), New York: Russell & Russell, 1964.

  Jerome Christensen, Lord Byron’s Strength, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.

  John Clubbe, ‘ “The New Prometheus of New Men”: Byron’s 1816 Poems and Manfred’, in Nineteenth-Century Literary Perspectives, ed. Clyde de L. Ryals et al., Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1974, pp. 17–47.

  Michael G. Cooke, The Blind Man Traces the Circle, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969.

  — ‘The Restoration Ethos of Byron’s Classical Plays’, PMLA 79 (1964), pp. 569–78.

  Martyn Corbett, Byron and Tragedy, New York: St Martin’s Press, 1988.

  Louis Crompton, Byron and Greek Love, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.

  Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism, New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

  R.J. Dingley, ‘ “I had a dream…”: Byron’s “Darkness” ’, Byron Journal 9(1981), pp. 20–33.

  Wilfred S. Dowden, ed., The Journal of Thomas Moore, 6 vols., Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1983.

  Paul W. Elledge, Byron and the Dynamics of Metaphor, Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1968.

  — ‘Divorce Italian Style: Byron’s Beppo’, Modern Language Quarterly 46 (1985), pp. 29–47.

  — ‘Talented Equivocation: Byron’s “Fare thee well!” ’, Keats–Shelley Journal 35 (1986), pp. 42–61.

  Sheila Emerson, ‘Byron’s “one word”: The Language of Self-Expression in Childe Harold III’, Studies in Romanticism 20 (1981), pp. 363–82.

  David Erdman, ‘ “Fare thee well!” – Byron’s Last Days in England’, in Shelley and His Circle, 1773–1822, ed. Kenneth Neill Cameron, Vol. 4, pp. 638–53.

  Caroline Franklin, Byron’s Heroines, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.

  Cheryl Fallon Giuliano, ‘Gulnare/Kaled’s “Untold” Feminization of Byron’s Oriental Tales’, Studies in English Literature 23 (1993), pp. 785–807.

  — ‘Marginal Discourse: The Authority of Gossip in Beppo’, in Rereading Byron, ed. Alice Levine and Robert N. Keane, New York and London: Garland, 1993, pp. 151–63.

  Robert F. Gleckner, Byron and the Ruins of Paradise, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967.

  Robert R. Harson, ‘Byron’s Tintern Abbey’, Keats–Shelley Journal 20 (1971), pp. 113–21.

  [Reginald Heber], ‘Lord Byron’s Dramas’, Quarterly Review 27 (1822), pp. 476–524; attribution by Andrew Rutherford, BCH, 1970, p. 236.

  Kurt Heinzelman, ‘Byron’s Poetry of Politics: The Economic Basis of the “Poetical Character” ’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 23 (1981), pp. 361–88.

  John A. Hodgson, ‘The Structures of Childe Harold III’, Studies in Romanticism 18 (1979), pp. 363–82.

  Diane Long Hoeveler, Romantic Androgyny: The Women Within, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990.

  Margaret J. Howell, Byron Tonight: A Poet’s Plays on the Nineteenth-Century Stage, Surrey: Springwood Books, 1982.

  [ Francis Jeffrey], Review of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and The Prisoner of Chillon, and Other Poems, Edinburgh Review 27 ( 12 December 1816), pp. 277–310; attribution by Donald H. Reiman, Romantics Reviewed, 1972, Part B, Vol. 2, p. 864.

  —‘Lord Byron’s Tragedies’, Edinburgh Review 36 (1822), pp. 413�
�52; attribution by Donald H. Reiman, Romantics Reviewed, 1972, Part B, Vol. 2, p. 918.

  Emrys Jones, ‘Byron’s Visions of Judgment’, Modern Language Review 76 (1981), pp. 1–19.

  M.K. Joseph, Byron the Poet, London: Gollancz, 1964.

  William Keach, ‘Political Inflection in Byron’s Ottava Rima’. Studies in Romanticism 27 (1988), pp. 551–62.

  Malcolm Kelsall, Byron’s Politics, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1987.

  G. Wilson Knight, ‘The Two Eternities: An Essay on Byron’, in The Burning Oracle, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939, pp. 199–288.

  Cecil Y. Lang, ‘Narcissus Jilted: Byron, Don Juan and the Biographical Imperative’, in Historical Studies and Literary Criticism, ed. Jerome J. McGann, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985, pp. 143–79.

  Marjorie Levinson, The Romantic Fragment Poem: A Critique of a Form, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986.

  Ernest J. Lovell, Jr., Byron: The Record of a Quest, (1949), Connecticut: Archon Books, 1966.

  — ed, see Thomas Medwin.

  D.L. Macdonald, Poor Polidori, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991.

  Wolf Mankowitz, Mazeppa: The Lives and Loves of Adah Isaacs Menken, London: Blond & Briggs, 1982.

  Peter J. Manning, Byron and His Fictions, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1978.

  — ‘Childe Harold in the Marketplace: From Romaunt to Handbook’, Modern Language Quarterly 52 (1991), pp. 170–90.

  — Reading Romantics: Texts and Contexts, New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1990.

  Leslie A. Marchand, Byron: A Biography, 3 vols., New York: Knopf, 1957/London: John Murray, 1958.

  — Byron’s Poetry, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968.

  William H. Marshall, Byron, Shelley, Hunt and THE LIBERAL, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960.

  Jerome J. McGann, ‘The Book of Byron and the Book of a World’, in The Beauty of Inflections, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988, pp. 255–93.