Don Juan Canto II responses

They [other epic poets] so embellish that ‘tis quite a bore

Their labyrinth of fables to thread through,

Whereas this story’s actually true.  (Don Juan, I.1609-10, 1614-16)

            …she [Haidee] was one

Fit for the model of a statuary
(A race of mere imposters, when all’s done;

I’ve seen much finer women, ripe and real,
Than all the nonsense of their stone ideal).  (Don Juan, II.940-44)

On Don Juan:  “[I]t is the sublime of that there sort of writing.  It may be bawdy, but is it not good English?  It may be profligate, but is it not life, is it not the thing?  Could any man have written it who has not lived in the world?”  (letter from Byron to Douglas Kinnard, 26 October 1819)

Hello Romanticists,

Throughout both the first two cantos of Don Juan, Byron denies that his poem is only a matter of aesthetic convention.  The narrative, unlike the twists and turns of classical epics, “is actually true”; Haidee is, unlike idealized sculpture, “ripe and real.”  Moreover, the whole of the poem, Byron argues, bears witness to the realities of everyday lived experience.  This may seem a ludicrous claim about a poem whose stanzaic and rhyme schemes are so carefully crafted and whose eponymous character is a legendary rather than real-life figure.  On the other hand, we know that all of Byron’s works flagrantly defy social convention.  In Canto II, as Juan’s erotic adventures continue, you’ll see Byron puncturing familiar, idealistic views of love and devotion. 

Less expectedly, he will also turn his focus to the depiction of disaster at sea.  Like love stories, shipwrecks are common literary tropes, but keep in mind that Byron’s shipwreck is both an artistic convention and a ripped-from-the-headlines reality.   Two years before Byron began Canto II, a French frigate called the Medusa ran aground off the coast of Africa.  Nearly 150 of its crew and passengers escaped on a raft, but with little food or water.  For 13 days they starved, raved, killed each other, ate their dead, and despaired.  By the time they were rescued, only 15 people were left alive.  The disaster garnered international attention.  In an era of radical instability, the story of the raft of the Medusa crystallized fears about the decay of civilization and the horrors that humans are capable of when pushed to the extreme.

This is the story in the background of Byron’s depiction of Juan and his comrades lost at sea.  You might consider what the poet’s characteristically irreverent portrayal says about this real-life event.  You might also compare it to the other famous artistic rendering of event: Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, a painting that was first displayed for the public in 1819, the same year in which the first two Cantos of Don Juan were published.

Remember to post your response to canto II by noon on Monday.

Happy reading,

Prof. M.

Géricault, Le Radeau de la Méduse

Byron responses

Hello Romanticists, and welcome to a new era.

We are still in the thick of British Romanticism, but having passed the midpoint of the semester, we now turn to a group often referred to as the second generation of Romantic poets.  We will talk more in class on Tuesday about what separates our first poets (Smith, Yearsley, Robinson, Blake, the anonymous weaver poet, Wordsworth, and Coleridge) from our second group (Byron, Hemans, PB Shelley, Clare, and Keats), the primary distinction is this: the first generation lived in a time of revolution; the second generation were born into a world in which the ideals driving revolution had already been realized, and had already compromised, diluted, or perverted.  Our second generation poets are thus still deeply desirous of social change, but their work has a distinctly different tone, one of caution, defensiveness, or bitterness.  

Lord Byron will be our introduction to this new generation.  Pay close attention to the biographical sketch in our anthology, first because it makes a rattling good yarn, but secondly because Byron’s persona is inseparable from his poetry, and in particular his greatest contribution to literature, the Byronic hero.  The greatest celebrity of his day, Byron was notorious for his string of scandalous affairs, his reckless racking up of debt, and his general tendency to defy moral or legal codes.  He develops the same persona in his poetry.  The figure is at once a lover and a misanthrope; achingly sincere and bitterly cynical.  He is a man of great passions, but they are always already past, as some unnamed trauma has soured him, turned him away from human society, and aged him before his time.  If you are acquainted with Heathcliff or Mr. Rochester, Eugene Onegin, the count of Monte Christo, Batman or Severus Snape, then you know the type. 

Byron first introduces his hero figure in the long, semi-autobiographical poem, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.  The publication of the first two cantos made Byron famous almost overnight.  Four years later, as he was fleeing scandal and debt in England, Byron wrote Canto III, the piece we’ll be discussing on Tuesday.  On the syllabus I have listed the stanzas that you must read, but please read more than that if you can. 

The final reading for Tuesday is short: “Messalonghi, 22 January 1824. On this day I complete my thirty-sixth year” (1065).  Note that he had sailed to the Greek city to fight in the Greek war of independence and that he died less than three months after writing the poem.  

Post your responses by noon on Monday.

Happy reading,
Prof. M.

P.S.: As befits a celebrity, Byron's death was mythologized in a flurry of artworks, including the following death-bed portrait by the Neo-Classical painter Joseph Denis Odevaere.

Melancholy responses

Hello romanticists,

On Tuesday we will be discussing Romantic treatments of psychic pain.  Or rather, we will be continuing our discussion with special focus, as of course we have been examining loss, betrayal, abuse, and loneliness across an array of poems up to now.  For Tuesday, give special attention to the ways in which each poet describes or defines her/his pain and consider how poetic form shapes these expressions.  You are already familiar with sonnet form (which Smith and Robinson employ).  Wordsworth and Coleridge by contrast use the ode, a Classical genre originally used as a mode of praise and performed publicly.

The Robinson poem, not included in our anthology,is below.  As always, post by Monday noon.

Happy reading, Prof. M


The Snow Drop
Thou meekest emblem of the infant year,
Why droops so cold and wan thy fragrant head?
Ah! why retiring to thy frozen bed,
Steals from thy silky leaves the trembling tear?
Day's op'ning eye shall warm thy gentle breast,
Revive thy timid charms and sickly hue;
Thy drooping buds shall drink the morning dew,
And bloom again by glowing Phoebus drest;
Or should the midnight damp, with icy breath,
Nip thy pale check, and bow thee to the ground,
Or the bleak winds thy blossoms scatter round,
And all thy modest beauties fade to death;
E'en in decay thy spotless sweets shall rise,
And midst Aurora's tears evap'rate in the skies.

Coleridge responses

Hello Romanticists,

Excellent work in discussion on Tuesday.  Despite our conversational wanderings– a Romantic tendency, after all– we developed a complex understanding of loneliness and loss in Robinson's poetry.  These will be important themes in the works of Coleridge, too, and in fact one of his most famous early works you will recognize a familiar figure of isolation:

        A sordid solitary thing,
Mid countless brethren with a lonely heart,
Through courts and cities the smooth savage roams
Feeling himself, his own low self the whole,
When he by sacred sympathy might make
The whole one self!
("Religious Musings," ll. 168-173, p. 630 in our anthology)

Coleridge's savage is a generalization while Robinson's is a real-life, particular person; similarly, Coleridge writes not a narrative but a philosophical meditation, inflected with his Unitarian faith.  Unitarian Christianity's central tenet is the unity or oneness of God (as opposed to the Trinitarian belief in a three-person God), and that yet at the same time God exists everywhere, in everyone, perceptibly.    Again from "Religious Musings":

There is one Mind, one omnipresent Mind
Omnific.  His most holy name is LOVE–
Truth of subliming import! with the which
Who feeds and saturates his constant soul,
He from his small particular orbit flies
With blessed outstarting!  (119-124)

Not only is God one, but because God is in all of us, all humans are one as well.  Such a belief should vanquish loneliness.  "Saturate" your soul with this faith and you will cease to contained within the confines of your own small, individual, fragmentary life.

However, what you believe intellectually and what you feel emotionally are not always the same.  Alongside his beliefs in and hopes for universal community, Coleridge struggled throughout his life with feelings of isolation and fragmentation.  A year after he finished "Religious Musings" he wrote to a friend:

I can at times feel strongly the beauties you describe– in themselves and for themselves.  But more frequently all things appear little– all the knowledge that can be acquired, child's play; the universe itself, what but an immense heap of little things?  I can contemplate nothing but parts, and parts are all little!  My mind feels as if itched to behold something great, something one and indivisible... (Letter to John Thelwall, p. 638 in our anthology).

As you'll see, Coleridge was dogged by the sense of fragments and parts in the form of his poems as well as their content.  Whether we're talking personal relationships or poetic articulations, little in Coleridge's life feels whole.  Keep an eye out for that particular form of isolation.

Post your responses below.  Meanwhile, enjoy the 1885 diagram of what is perhaps the most potent image of British Romantic poetry: the aeolian harp.

Happy holidays, and happy reading,
Prof. M.