Byron criticism and class notes

Question 1

Why was Byron’s work not haunted by Milton’s?

Answer 1

He disliked blank verse.

“I am not persuaded that the Paradise Lost would not have been more nobly conveyed to posterity … in the Stanza of Spenser or of Tasso, or in the terza rima of Dante, which the powers of Milton could easily have grafted on our language.”

Question 2

In what ways did Milton have an important influence on Byron’s work and life?

Answer 2

• In his Satanism, and in the poetic tradition of the criminal hero.
• In Byron’s interpretative and imaginative use of Milton’s life. From 1816 he began to develop an autobiographical myth strongly linked to Milton, his personal and political history.

Question 3

How did Byron bring Milton to his defence of ‘Cain’?

Answer 3

“I have made Lucifer say not more in his defence than was absolutely necessary, - not half so much as Milton makes his Satan do.”

Question 4

How did Leigh Hunt cut through Byron’s Milton defence of ‘Cain’?

Answer 4

They were “mystifying” remarks, that leave “unsaid everything germane to the issue.”

“Milton, in his “Paradise Lost,” intended nothing against the religious opinions of his time; Lord Byron did.”

Question 5

Does Byron see Lucifer as the moral exemplar of ‘Cain’?

Answer 5

No - far from it - he represented Lucifer in a critical light.

Nonetheless, “if he gave his diabolic prince certain negative qualities, he also created for him a number of sympathetic contexts, as well as several parting speeches. Lucifer’s parting words to Cain are a stirring rhetorical plea for one of Byron’s deepest convictions: intellectual freedom.”

Question 6

How does Byron conceive of the “end” of a tragedy?

Answer 6

In terms of the ‘criminal hero’.

Byron quotes Aristotle and Rymer to say that the end of a tragedy is to excite pity and terror, and that the hero of a tragedy is a criminal; the pity and terror are in his punishment; he must not be too great an offender, or he will not be pitied, and if he is completely innocent his punishment will be unjust.

In his own words: “The hero of tragedy and (I add meo periculo) a tragic poem must be guilty … Who is the hero of Paradise Lost? Why Satan – and Macbeth, and Richard, and Othello …”

Question 7

Does Byron idealise the ‘criminal hero’?

Answer 7

No, but his argument depends upon “a humanized interpretation of the fallen angel.”

He thus inherits the 18th century line of criticism which aimed to defend cause of Satan as hero by developing a set of human qualities for him.

Question 8

How does Byron conceive of the purpose of ‘Paradise Lost’?

Answer 8

He believed Satan was equivocally represented and certain that the poem was non-dogmatic.

Cain is “not a piece of argument” and Milton’s epics “prove nothing”.

Milton gives Satan “human passions … makes him pity Adam and Eve”. Byron does not find that Milton’s poems reveal his true beliefs on the matter.

Question 9

On what principle does Byron defend his Cain, his many other tragic/dark heroes, and the “depraved” hero-villains/villain-heroes of Gothic literature?

Answer 9

On the same principle of his reading of Paradise Lost, that they were humanized.

His tragic heroes were not meant as models of behaviour, but “records of guilt and suffering”.

Question 10

Why does Byron criticise Milton’s portrayal of God?

Answer 10

Following Pope and others, he thought God was too mundane, thus sounding silly when delivering His long theological tracts. “According to Byron, He should never have appeared in the epic at all.”

Question 11

What does Byron think of Milton’s Satan?

Answer 11

He was also too mundane. Wrought with art but still a simple criminal-hero. “Guilty he most certainly was, but a pure principle of evil he was not.”

This might be why Byron and others read Satan as hero of ‘Paradise Lost’ and perhaps by extension Milton’s alter-ego: because he was a criminal-hero, guilty by verdict of the state, not guilty of innate evil.

Question 12

What did his humanistic reading of ‘Paradise Lost’ allow Byron to do?

Answer 12

Create his own famous portraits of the criminal hero.

Question 13

Were Byron’s criminal-hero poems a means for asserting his philosophical convictions?

Answer 13

No - If Byron was uncertain about Milton’s beliefs he was equally unsure of his own, theological and philosophical, and was a lifelong sceptic.

“These poems were Byron’s means not for asserting his philosophical convictions, but for exploring the intellectual questions which never ceased to bother him. Moreover, the crucial vehicles for his intellectual questionings were his notorious and deeply problematic heroes, all of whom, as we know, trace their heritage back to Milton’s Satan.”

Question 14

What did Byron believe himself to be?

Answer 14

The avatar of a fallen angel.

Question 15

Who wrote ‘Byron and Milton’?

Answer 15

Jerome McGann

Question 16

How does McGann describe what Byron’s early Satanic criminal-heroes were for the poet?

Answer 16

“Guilty and fascinating beings”

Question 17

How does Byron, along with Shelley, distinguish between Satan and Prometheus ?

Answer 17

Satan is self-destroyed, Prometheus is the “innocent victim of an arbitrary external power.”

Byron’s heroes were of the Satanic kind, “errant on dark ways diverse” (Algernon Charles Swinburne).

Question 18

Is Prometheus a tragic hero in Byron’s terms?

Answer 18

Not at all.

Rather than waging war on man, as Byron’s Satanic heroes do, Prometheus is “marvellously humanitarian”.

Remember that Byron’s Satanic heroes are importantly humanised.

Question 19

What did Byron paint?

Answer 19

“Sympathetic portraits of bad men”

Question 20

What does Byron’s letter to Lady Blessington contain?

Answer 20

The following passage:

“It is my respect for morals that makes me so indignant against its vile substitute cant, with which I wage war, and this the good-natured world chooses to consider as a sign of my wickedness. We are all the creatures of circumstance, the greater part of our errors are caused, if not excused, by events and situations over which we have had little control; the world see the faults, but they see not what led to them: therefore I am always lenient to crimes that have brought their own punishment, while I am a little disposed to pity those who think they atone for their own sins by exposing those of others, and add cant and hypocrisy to the catalogue of their vices.”

“This is Byron as genteel reformer” (McGann).

The “guilty adventurers” force readers to sympathy by urging them to consider every circumstance of the case.

“The reader is asked not to excuse but to seek understanding.”

Question 21

Recall the description of the hero in ‘Lara’

Answer 21

“There was in him a vital scorn of all; / As if the worst had fall’n which could befall, / He stood a stranger in this breathing world, / An erring spirit from another hurl’d … With more capacity for love than earth/ Bestows on most of mortal mould and birth, / His early dreams of good outstripped the truth, / And troubled manhood followed baffled youth … Till he at last confounded good and ill, / And half mistook for fate the acts of will.” Lara, 1.313-336

The portrait moves quickly, rushing ahead, as if to demonstrate our lack of control in human affairs. The hero’s life is confounded in his will and fate just as the reader’s scheme for moral order is confounded by such a presentation of a criminal.

Question 22

What does the Byronic hero illustrate in his life?

Answer 22

In his life he illustrates what the reader who meets him discovers in themselves - conflict, contradiction…

They prove nothing, but raise questions.

Question 23

What does McGann consider the ‘primary function’ of the Byronic hero?

Answer 23

“To instil in the reader a dislocated and melancholy intelligence.”

This is part of Byron’s war on ‘cant’.

“Our sympathy for such a man is the melancholy sign of human ineffectuality.”

Question 24

Why do the monks of ‘The Giaour’ fear to regard the hero?

Answer 24

Byronic heroes are difficult to look on.

His appearance troubles their consciences, an effect innate to all of the species.

Question 25

Recall the passage describing the experience of looking at the hero in ‘Lara’

Answer 25

“But they who saw him did not see in vain, / And once beheld, would ask of him again … None knew, nor how, nor why, but he entwined/Himself perforce around the hearer’s mind; / There he was stamp’d, in liking, or in hate, / If greeted once; however brief the date / That friendship, pity, or aversion knew, / Still there within the inmost thought he grew. / You could not penetrate his soul, but found, / Despite your wonder, to your own he wound …” Lara, 1.361-382.

Such a man is a “living challenge to the comforts of undemanding and conventional ethics” and to have known him is “to have discovered a new and terrifying problematics of morality”.

Question 26

Why do sorrows and disasters hunt the Byronic hero?

Answer 26

“He remains, in some radical way, unprotected”

Question 27

In extension to this, why are ordinary men ordinary?

Answer 27

Because “they are protected … by cant”.

They do not suffer in the nets of circumstance which ensnare the Byronic hero, but even more because they do not see the true complexities of good and evil.

“He knew himself a villain, but he deem’d / The rest no better than the thing he seem’d” (The Corsair)

“I am not innocent - but are these guiltless?” (Marino Falieri)

Question 28

How is the Byronic hero reflexive?

Answer 28

“I am not innocent - but are these guiltless?”

Meditating on the obscure complexities of the figure, the reader is thrown back on himself. The hero is not frightening for what they reveal about themselves, but for what they reveal in the reader.

A mirror.

Question 29

Why did Byron’s tales and plays achieve such enormous influence?

Answer 29

“Their heroes forced the reader to a more searching inquiry into norms for order and value”

Question 30

What is Byron’s “existential” reading of Aristotle on tragic effect?

Answer 30

The end of tragedy is pity and fear - “but he says nothing about the purgation of these emotions and a restoration of a final sense of order. Byron’s reading of Aristotle stays in media res.”

• “Just as his plays and tales refuse to set the problems they raise within a context of comfort, understanding, and government.”

Question 31

Why are pre-Byronic hero-villains sentimental figures?

Answer 31

They finally set aside the intellectual issues they themselves have raised for us.

Question 32

Why are Byron’s “actively intellectual works”, as opposed to the gothic ones like ‘The Monk’ and ‘The Italian’?

Answer 32

The sentimental gothic heroes set aside the intellectual issues they have raised, they at some point rein in their questionings and set the reader’s consciousness at rest; whereas Byron’s heroes carry out their skeptical programs.

Question 33

How does Byron understand Milton’s mind?

Answer 33

To be as “searching and unsettled as his own” (McGann).

He avoids proof and argument and provokes speculation on the issues raised in his epics ‘by his non-dogmatic handling of some very dogmatically conditioned materials.”

Question 34

What did Byron say of the Giaour in remembrance of Milton?

Answer 34

Nothing “Could quell/Thy soul, till from itself it fell”

Question 35

What did Byron write of Napoleon in his Ode?

Answer 35

“Since he, miscall’d the Morning Star, / Nor man nor field hath fallen so far”

This acquired a “weirdly self-reflexive dimension”

Question 36

What pattern did he see in his own life, which is found in Napoleon’s and Milton’s (and Satan’s)?

Answer 36

One of eminence and degradation.

“The fault was mine - nor do I seek to screen / My errors with defensive paradox - I have been cunning in mine overthrow / The careful pilot of my proper woe” Epistle to Augusta.

“The last two lines draw Byron into the Miltonic company of the self-fallen and the self-condemned”

The first two lines recall a Miltonic passage of ‘Manfred’

“There is a power upon me which withholds,
And makes it my fatality to live;
If it be life to wear within myself
This barrenness of spirit, and to be
My own soul’s sepulchre, for I have ceased
To justify my deeds unto myself -
The last infirmity of evil”

Question 37

How does McGann describe ‘Manfred’?

Answer 37

‘A nakedly autobiographical piece in which Byron tries to represent what sort of life can remain for a man once he knows not only that his soul is a sepulchre, but that he himself has made it so.”

Question 38

How does ‘Manfred’ compare to ‘Epistle to Augusta’?

Answer 38

Even though at the end of Epistle he says “The World is all Before Me”, the way he takes is solitary and problematic, like Adam and Eve’s. But Manfred, while he has lonely and equivocal circumstances throughout, comes to accept his barrenness of spirit, and to find in such desolation an unexpected gift. “Desert”.

Question 39

How does Byron establish Satan as Manfred’s ancestor?

Answer 39

“On his brow / The thunder-scars are graven” (3.4.76-77)

Question 40

How does Manfred alter Satan’s “famous dictum”?

Answer 40

“The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”

When Manfred echoes this, 3.1.70, 3.4.129, we glimpse the state of mind of a man who has freed himself from the last infirmity of his own confessed evil. There is no “defensive paradox”, self-justification.

If Manfred is to be born again, it will have to be from the knowledge of his own desert.
“The mind which is immortal makes itself
Requital for its good or evil thoughts,
Is its own origin of ill and end,
And its own place and time; its innate sense,
When stripped of this mortality, derives
No colour from the fleeting things without,
But is absorb’d in sufferance or in joy,
Born from the knowledge of its own desert” 3.4.127-136

Desert - wasteland, or treat.

Question 41

To be born out of your own mind

Answer 41

To cancel out… villain-hero.

Question 42

How does Childe Harolde IV return to Milton?

Answer 42

It has two subjects; one personal, Lord Byron and his disastrous history; one political, the present state of Italian degradation.

Byron hopes to reacquire personal control of his life through poetically depicting the political scene. But in setting about this task he invokes Milton, England’s other defamed republican genius, who spoke out for freedom in a different time of trouble.

Byron looks to Milton for guidance and strength.