Lord Byron: Selected Poems

Rating:
Summary: BYRON AT HIS BEST . . .
Review: A legend in his own lifetime, Lord Byron stamped contemporary Western culture with the mark of his dark imagination, and his poetry has lost none of its iconoclastic power today. Without a doubt, this is the finest single-volume edition of Byron currently available. By omitting the rambling satirical romp "Don Juan" (widely available separately), editors Wolfson and Manning leave themselves enough space to provide a truly representative selection of Byron's greatest works. Jerome McGann's "Oxford Authors" volume is a strong competitor, and benefits from superior notes, but only this Penguin collection offers unabridged texts of the three Oriental Tales with which Byron followed "The Giaour"--"The Bride of Abydos," "The Corsair," and "Lara"--all of which are thrilling narratives, and indispensable for tracing the development of that towering figure of English Romanticism, the Byronic Hero. Thus, this edition presents (for the first time in one volume) a complete portrait of the Byronic Hero in his many guises, from vampire ("The Giaour") to pirate ("The Corsair") to necromancer ("Manfred") to fallen angel ("Cain"). Furthermore, Wolfson and Manning supply the complete text of "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" (the work that established Byron's reputation in his own lifetime), along with many other rousing verse romances, including "The Siege of Corinth," "The Prisoner of Chillon," and "Mazeppa," as well as a generous selection of Byron's most arresting shorter poems, such as "The Destruction of Sennacherib," "Promethus," and the nightmarish, end-of-the-world fantasy, "Darkness." Fans of Byron's ironic mode will welcome the inclusion of three of his satirical works; however, the strength of this volume rests on the fact that it presents Byron at his most Byronic. These are his most sublime creations-the works that defined the Romantic movement--and to read them is to discover anew why he is still ranked, throughout the world, as the greatest English-language writer after Shakespeare.

Rating:
Summary: Byron: Overrated Romantic
Review: Byron's poems don't seem to seek to make any statements. Unlike his Romantic contemporaries Keats, Coleride, and Wordsworth, (even Shelley, to some extent) Byron puts forth no idealogy as to what poetry should be. Instead, he relies on certain aspects of that Romantic idealogy, such as frequent parallels between the state of man and the state of nature... however, with few excceptions, this fails to create unique insights, comments, or even descriptions in his writings. What results is florid, wordy, rhyming travel writing, often promoting British or macho ideals. This edition receives a low grade because it fails to lead me to any better of an impression of a poet that has obviously been influential and looked on as an esteemed figure for so many years. This book can be read as an interesting historical document, and, perhaps most importantly, as Romantic poetry falls out of favor, Byron's poetry as collected within helps to explain the reason why.

Rating:
Summary: Byron: Overrated Romantic
Review: I've been reading this book over the past few days, and already Byron has become one of my dozen or so favorite poets. The third canto of "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" is just brilliant, and many of his shorter poems are unforgettable once read.

But in the process of reading I have come across one problem with the editing of Wolfson and Manning - a problem of notes. All they provide in that way is a short introduction-like essay to each poem in the back of the book, that discusses the history of the poem a little, its reception, and some of its themes. But there are no notes to individual passages, as there are in the other Penguin Classics volume of "Don Juan." Where this becomes a big problem is when Byron quotes a foreign language such as Italian, as he does fairly often - although the editors provide translations for the foreign language epigraphs to the poems, they have none for any foreign language quotations that occur in his notes. Thus the point Byron is trying to make is sometimes lost on a modern reader who doesn't know Greek, or Italian, or whatever.

The poems included in this volume are [long poems in capitals, short poems in quotation marks]: "A Fragment," "To Woman," "The Cornelian," "To Caroline," ENGLISH BARDS AND SCOTCH REVIEWERS, "Lines to Mr. Hodgson," "Maid of Athens, ere we part," "Written after Swimming from Sestos to Abydos," "To Thyrza," CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE: Cantos 1-4, "An Ode to the Framers of the Liberty Bill," "Lines to a Lady Weeping," THE WALTZ, "Remember Thee! Remember Thee," THE GIAOUR, THE BRIDE OF ABYDOS, THE CORSAIR, "Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte," "Stanzas for Music," "She walks in beauty," LARA, "The Destruction of Sennacherib," "Napoleon's Farewell," "From the French," THE SIEGE OF CORINTH, "When we two parted," "Fare thee well," "Prometheus," THE PRISONER OF CHILLON, "Darkness," "Epistle to Augusta," "Lines," MANFRED, "So, we'll go no more a roving," "Epistle from Mr. Murray to Dr. Polidori," BEPPO, "Epistle to Mr. Murray," MAZEPPA, "Stanzas to the Po," "The Isles of Greece," "Francesca of Rimini," "Stanzas," SARDANAPALUS, "Who kill'd John Keats?," THE BLUES, THE VISION OF JUDGEMENT, and "On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year."

Rating:
Summary: Byron's Selected Poems
Review: I've been reading this book over the past few days, and already Byron has become one of my dozen or so favorite poets. The third canto of "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" is just brilliant, and many of his shorter poems are unforgettable once read.

But in the process of reading I have come across one problem with the editing of Wolfson and Manning - a problem of notes. All they provide in that way is a short introduction-like essay to each poem in the back of the book, that discusses the history of the poem a little, its reception, and some of its themes. But there are no notes to individual passages, as there are in the other Penguin Classics volume of "Don Juan." Where this becomes a big problem is when Byron quotes a foreign language such as Italian, as he does fairly often - although the editors provide translations for the foreign language epigraphs to the poems, they have none for any foreign language quotations that occur in his notes. Thus the point Byron is trying to make is sometimes lost on a modern reader who doesn't know Greek, or Italian, or whatever.

The poems included in this volume are [long poems in capitals, short poems in quotation marks]: "A Fragment," "To Woman," "The Cornelian," "To Caroline," ENGLISH BARDS AND SCOTCH REVIEWERS, "Lines to Mr. Hodgson," "Maid of Athens, ere we part," "Written after Swimming from Sestos to Abydos," "To Thyrza," CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE: Cantos 1-4, "An Ode to the Framers of the Liberty Bill," "Lines to a Lady Weeping," THE WALTZ, "Remember Thee! Remember Thee," THE GIAOUR, THE BRIDE OF ABYDOS, THE CORSAIR, "Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte," "Stanzas for Music," "She walks in beauty," LARA, "The Destruction of Sennacherib," "Napoleon's Farewell," "From the French," THE SIEGE OF CORINTH, "When we two parted," "Fare thee well," "Prometheus," THE PRISONER OF CHILLON, "Darkness," "Epistle to Augusta," "Lines," MANFRED, "So, we'll go no more a roving," "Epistle from Mr. Murray to Dr. Polidori," BEPPO, "Epistle to Mr. Murray," MAZEPPA, "Stanzas to the Po," "The Isles of Greece," "Francesca of Rimini," "Stanzas," SARDANAPALUS, "Who kill'd John Keats?," THE BLUES, THE VISION OF JUDGEMENT, and "On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year."