This volume offers a wide-ranging, comprehensive selection of Byron’s poetry and prose. It includes eighteen of his lyrics; Cantos One, Three, and excerpts from Canto Four of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage ; two verse romances, The Prisoner of Chillon and The Giaour, the latter newly receiving critical attention for its prophetically disjunctive structure; Manfred; The Vision of Judgment ; and Don Juan, presented in long self-contained extracts―the First, Fifth, Ninth, and Sixteenth Cantos complete, with the close of the Second Canto. An unusually rich selection from Byron’s letters and journals accompanies the poems. The critical essays offer an integrated view of Byron’s achievement as well as analyses of its different facets. Published for the first time is Bergen Evans’s general essay "Lord Byron’s Pilgrimage"; other essays are by John D. Jump, Michael G. Cooke, Francis Berry, Robert F. Gleckner, James R. Thompson, Frank D. McConnell, Leslie A. Marchand, and E. D. Hirsch, Jr. A special section, "Images of Byron," presents 26 views of Byron as artist and as the epitome of the Romantic hero, ranging from the perspectives of his contemporaries to those of such modern writers as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and Albert Camus. A Chronology sets forth the main events of Byron’s life, and a Selected Bibliography lists sources for further study.
Author
George Gordon Byron (invariably known as Lord Byron), later Noel, 6th Baron Byron of Rochdale FRS was a British poet and a leading figure in Romanticism. Amongst Byron's best-known works are the brief poems She Walks in Beauty, When We Two Parted, and So, we'll go no more a roving, in addition to the narrative poems Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Don Juan. He is regarded as one of the greatest British poets and remains widely read and influential, both in the English-speaking world and beyond. Byron's notabilty rests not only on his writings but also on his life, which featured upper-class living, numerous love affairs, debts, and separation. He was notably described by Lady Caroline Lamb as "mad, bad, and dangerous to know". Byron served as a regional leader of Italy's revolutionary organization, the Carbonari, in its struggle against Austria. He later travelled to fight against the Ottoman Empire in the Greek War of Independence, for which Greeks revere him as a national hero. He died from a fever contracted while in Messolonghi in Greece.
