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Lord Byron: The Major Works (Oxford World's Classics) Reissue Edition
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Byron is regarded today as the ultimate Romantic, whose name has entered the language to describe a man of brooding passion. Although his private life shocked his contemporaries his poetry was immensely popular and influential, especially in Europe. This comprehensive edition includes the complete texts of his two poetic masterpieces Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Don Juan, as well as the dramatic poems Manfred and Cain. There are many other shorter poems and part of the satire English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. In addition there is a selection from Byron's inimitable letters, extracts from his journals and conversations, as well as more formal writings.
About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
- ISBN-10019953733X
- ISBN-13978-0199537334
- EditionReissue
- PublisherOxford University Press
- Publication dateNovember 15, 2008
- LanguageEnglish
- Dimensions7.6 x 2 x 5 inches
- Print length1120 pages
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- Publisher : Oxford University Press; Reissue edition (November 15, 2008)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 1120 pages
- ISBN-10 : 019953733X
- ISBN-13 : 978-0199537334
- Reading age : 13 years and up
- Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
- Dimensions : 7.6 x 2 x 5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #55,087 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2 in English Literature
- #35 in British & Irish Poetry
- #738 in Unknown
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Goethe said no poet of Byron's stature would come again and he was a formative poet, one where the reader is transformed, and that makes him great; but Goethe also pointed at a child, an immature, aspect of Byron as well.
Byron lived a full life, he was a rebel, and a genius. Loving life and living were what he was about and his poetry places himself his actions in some encompassing history of destiny and fate. He had a passion for liberty and humanism yet he maintained an aura of sorrow. His descriptions of himself might well reflect his own on Rousseau (p.127-), except he stood on the opposite side the history of revolution and Napoleon; perhaps he was that of a more matured Rousseau but still immature none-the-less. He often took a stoic sad appreciation of storms, rough waves, avalanches. G K Chesterton pointed to Byron having sad words but his prosody is that of and optimist, he exudes optimism faces his storms with inspiring optimism. Byron was complex and possibly the most influential poet of all time.
His success and the challenges it posed to the social mores and what was considered respectable thinking were difficult for Byron's native land to swallow. According to Wilfred Sheed, in his introduction to "Leave it To Psmith" by Wodehouse, focused academics and Head Masters and such to derisively quell any Byron-like poet upstarts and left the English-speaking world with something shallow, or at the best more subtle. But as France went on to produce Rimbauds and Flauberts the English-speaking world produced entertainment that mocks their sort, and their artsy kind; English entertainment like Gilbert and Sullivan and Wodehouse -- Byron mocked England in his own day the English choose an art that mocked him. Byron did not glorify the great battles of his nation in his day, like Waterloo, but merely equated England as a sort of cog in history; slowing things down but really not affecting anything for the better. Plus he gave more credit to Russia for Napoleon's defeat then the British might want to have admitted.
(a) the selection and compilation is not ideal, making the entire book too unwieldy to be really enjoyable. I agree with a previous comment: Don Juan should have been hived off into a separate volume; The Corsair and Lara should be there in full, plus a few other great poems
(b) the introduction by Jerome McGann is disgraceful and not worthy of Byron. As a German reader I cannot help but stumble over comments such as the following, and wonder if this person, a professor of "Victorian Studies" (whatever that's supposed to be) knows what he is doing:
"no other literary figure, not even Goethe, was so widely and actively engaged with the important people and events of his time." A curious statement: everyone knows that Goethe tried as hard as he could to stay away from the great politics of his age; he met Napoleon, but only at the latter's request; he shunned the great capitals, Vienna, Paris, London, etc. and went to Berlin only reluctantly, on business with his Duke. Having said this, he was famous for nearly 60 years (1773-1832), most of which he spend in Weimar, which just happens to be exactly on the main West-East Axis of Europe, from Paris to Moscow, and also on a major North-South Axis, from Hamburg and Berlin via Prague to Vienna and on to Budapest and the Balkans. It does not get any more central in Europe than that! As a result, hundreds of famous people passed by during the Age of Goethe (Napoleon did several times), and many stopped over to meet the poet. The ageing Goethe also spent substantial time in the Bohemian spas, where in those days of course tout le monde convened. Byron was famous for 14 years (1810-24), many of which he spent on the European periphery (England, Portugal, Levante, Greece); in the main, he would have had opportunity to "meet the important people of his time" while residing in what McGann terms "Italy" and what politically speaking were Habsburg lands (Venice, Pisa) and Papal lands (Ravenna, Rome), where he spent six years. Without having studied Byron's biography in detail, it is quite simply inconceivable that Byron could even physically have met as many "important people of his time" as did Goethe.
"Napoleon... aimed at the transformation of the political structure of all Europe. His chief adversary in this struggle was England." Now, is this English humour? Or is there simply so much fog over the English Channel that McGann remains entirely ignorant of European history? Napoleon's aims were to seize the Imperial crown, establish the leading European dynasty, and push the boundaries of his Empire beyond the Rhine. In all three of these, Germany, not England, was naturally his "chief adversary"; by 1812 he had more or less achieved them: he had destroyed the Holy Roman Empire and seized the imperial crown (but had not been able to prevent the Habsburg Franz II to simply re-crown himself Emperor of Austria); he had married Franz's daughter Marie-Louise and thereby legitimised his imperial dynasty, and he had occupied much of Germany or controlled it as his satellites via the Confederacy of the Rhine. He failed to subdue Prussia and Russia, and that would be his undoing. England did not feature large in any of this. England controlled the sea, and that was a big headache for Napoleon's trade and supply of war material, but she did not have a major land army and did not participate in any of the decisive land battles of the Napoleonic wars (she did at Waterloo, but that battle was more of an afterthought: Napoleon was defeated in Russia and in Saxony, and returning from Elba his quickly gobbled together rag-tag army would have stood no chance once the Austrians and Russians arrived on the scene with their main armies; Wellington, whose army was even more rag-tag, was about to succumb to him, had not Bluecher's Prussians arrived just in time to bail him out--but again, all of which does not matter very much: Napoleon's days were over). England was always a nuisance for Napoleon, as she was for Hitler some time later, but in neither case was she a "main adversary": she simply did not matter enough (Hitler's focus was on "Lebensraum im Osten," i.e., his main adversary was, qua geography and of necessity, the Soviet Union; Hollywood proffers the impression that the landing in the Normandy was the decisive military turning point, but of course it was Stalingrad). England had 10m inhabitants in 1800; the Holy Roman Empire, France and Russia each had 30m or more. I see a pattern here, in respect to English historicism: be it vis a vis Napoleon, Hitler or more recently the EU, for some reason the English always try to elevate themselves into a role and importance in Europe they quite simply do not have and never had. The interpretation of history they propagate seems to be mere propaganda propelled by some kind of insular inferiority complex. "Fog over the Channel: Europe cut off." Surely McGann must recognise that not all his readers will be this uninformed and uneducated about European history? His Chronology includes a few events that involved Britain; almost none of the major events of the Coalition Wars against Napoleon are mentioned (most of which Britain was not involved with). Yes Britain had some tactical land operations on the "Peninsula" as he calls it (he means the Iberian; perhaps he doesn't know that there are other peninsulas in Europe?), but they were fairly negligible to Napoleon, who only once personally went to Spain, to quickly crush the unruly Spanish and quickly return to the main battlegrounds in Southern Germany. Wellington's small contingents in Portugal he left to his junior generals, as a sort of training boot camp.
"The years--1817-23--saw the beginning of the European settlement under the leadership, not to say the domination, of England." LOL. No, it was under the leadership of the "so-called Holy Alliance," which, mind you, England was not member of. More fog over the Channel. And I suppose the "notorious Congress of Vienna" is only "notorious" to Mr. McGann because England in 1815 played but a minor role in the re-ordering of Europe (as a consolation prize, she was awarded the honourable task of dispatching Napoleon far, far away. Presumable Napoleon chose to surrender to one of her ships precisely because she had been far less involved in his hegemonic raids than had the Germans and Russians; had he surrendered to the Prussians or Austrians, they'd have put him up against the nearest available wall. An English sea captain was a pussycat in comparison).
"students of history and literature have often dated the Romantic Period 1789-1824." Well, in Germany, the mothership of the Romantic movement, nobody does that (the beginnings of it are often identified in the 1750s and 60s, and this includes some important English roots, such as in sentimentalism, which McGann's dating does not seem to acknowledge). The French Revolution was of course intellectually influential on many fronts, but not particularly in so far as Romanticism is concerned, so 1789 is a strange starting point; 1824 (Byron's death) is perhaps more defendable: perhaps he really was the last major Romantic. Maybe McGann's dating is an English convention, but Romanticism came to England late and never really took hold, and it does not help his reader to repeatedly emphasise how European a poet Byron was (which I agree with) but then completely fail to put him into an overall Romantic context.
Apart from writing in the language of shopkeepers, which we shall forgive him, as he does so beautifully (as beautifully as that language allows, anyhow), Byron really was a European poet, and to fully come into his own, he had to exile himself to the continent, because in England he would never have been fully understood. And as McGann's introduction suggests, he is not understood there to this day. The most important Ariadne's thread that runs through his entire works and is the heart of soul of his Byronian hero, his complex sexuality, McGann does not even mention once.
I really like Don Juan, and if you like Lord Byron. You will also like this book
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Pelo tamanho, achei que tivesse mais poemas, mas há bem poucos, na verdade. Apenas os principais MESMO. A maior parte das páginas é ocupada por poemas imensos, como Manfred, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage e, principalmente, Don Juan (só ele tem umas 600 páginas), além de algumas stanzas entre eles. Tem poemas famosos do Lord Byron que ficaram de fora, como The Destruction of Senaqueribe e Lines Inscribed Upon a Cup Formed From a Skull. As cartas no final são interessantes para fins historiográficos, mas seria melhor se fossem substituídas por mais poemas.
Enfim, só vale a pena se pegar numa promoção muito boa (comprei com um vale-presente). Definitivamente não compensa pagar quase R$ 100,00, ainda mais porque todos os poemas dele já caíram em domínio público e podem facilmente ser encontrados na internet.