Comments on Byron and His Works (不断更新中)

methos

随便贴一些评拜伦及其作品的话——都是我喜欢的，所以基本都是正面的。 反面评论有T.S. Eliot，想找也不难。

The first thing you have got to do, in reading Byron to purpose, is to remember his motto, "Trust Byeron". You always may; and the more, that he takes some little pleasure at first in offending you. But all he says is true, nevertheless, though what worst of himself there is to tell, he insists upon at once; and what good there may be, mostly leaves you to find out.
---John Ruskin (1819 -1900)

In spite of his prodigious vogue, Byron has never yet, perhaps, had the serious admiration which he deserves.Even of his passionate admirers, how many never got beyond the theatrical Byron, from whom they caught the fashion of deranging their hair, or of knotting their neck-handkerchief, or of leaving their shirt-collar unbuttoned; how few profoundly felt his vital influence, the influence of his splendid and imperishable excellence of sincerity and strength! His own aristocratic class, whose cynical make-believe drove him to fury; the great middle-class, on whose impregnable Philistinism he shattered himself to pieces, - how little have either of these felt Byron's vital influence!
---Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)

Byron is the only poet since Shakespeare to possess one of Shakespeare's rarest gifts: that of pure artistic joy in the annals.... of human action; in close association, moreover, with places..... It is an ability to love, not mankind, as did Shelley, but men; and men, or women, of various sorts, places and times.
---G. Wilson Knight (1897-1985)

In the history of English poetry before the so-called Romantic Age, comic poetry is comparatively rare: some of Chaucer, some of Dunbar, Skelton, Samuel (Hudibras) Butler. Dryden and Pope, though they often write funny lines, cannot be classified as comic poets. But, from 1800 onwards comic poetry has flourished. Byron, Moore (especially in his political poems), Praed, Hood, Barham, Lear and Carroll (slightly to one side), W.S. Gilbert, J.K. Stephen, Calverly, and in this century the best of Chesterton and Belloc, not to mention the anonymous host of limerick writers, represent a tradition without which English poetry would be very much the poorer, and of them all, Byron is by far the greatest. Whatever its faults, Don Juan is the most original poem in English; nothing like it had ever been written before. Speaking for myself, I don't feel like reading it very often, but when I do, it is the only poem I want to read: no other will do.
---W.H. Auden (1907-73)

In Byron's case, power and priority, and hence anxiety, are very much an issue up to 1816 or so, but the anxiety, with its "desperate insistence upon priority," is not a literary issue. The fact is that Byron has no serious literary commitments before 1816, when he exiled himself, and it was not until the middle of 1817 that he definitely and somewhat reluctantly, decided to "twine / my hopes of being remembered in my line / With my land's language"(Childe Harold IV. 9). The result of this -- and the contrast here with Wordsworth and Keats is glaring -- was that Byron spent the better part of twelve years learning how to write poetry without a thought that he was doing anything crucially important to himself. Poetry was like a hobby to him, or a pastime, as he frequently admitted -- often with a sense of shame, either that he should be wasting his time on verse when politics was his real concern, or that he, a mere dilettante, should be folling around on the slopes of Parnassus. In other words, Byron literally /found/ himself at the top of his poetic powers; he went through his apprenticeship without knowing it was an apprenticeship, and he thereby saved himself all those literary anxieties which Wordsworth and Keats, for example, suffered so deeply and self-consciously. If Byron had planned a way of avoiding literary anxiety, he could not have hit upon a better one, particularly for the period in which he lived.
---Jerome McGann (1937-)

[ 本帖最后由 methos 于 2007-11-13 11:09 PM 编辑 ]

methos

I must confess at the outset that I find [Don Juan] a grim one -- funny, even hilarious at times, irreverent, coarse, moral and immoral at once, but through it all, despairing. It is a poem of endless cycles or... endless repetitions of the Fall, which form the skeletal framework for the myriad variations Byron plays upon the nature of the fallen. Furthermore, it is a poem written (or narrated) from the point of view of the fallen, and this central fact determines both the form and style of the entire work. It is not written from above, or chanted mysterious from within the temple of prophecy, or thundered divinely from the mount; the gaze of the poet is level with life, the accents of his voice the very accents of all men.
---Robert F. Gleckner (1967)

Though scattered examples of "philosophic nihilism" and "despair" certainly exist in [Don Juan], I cannot agree with Wilkie and Gleckner that they represent the dominant mood of the poem as a whole.... I believe that Don Juan, despite occasional lapses into despondency and spleen, reflects a deep conviction that life and the spectacle it affords are endlessly fascinating even though life's plan is incomprehensible and ultimately unknowable. It reminds us of one of the greatest stimuli to the onward thrust of life, the awareness of man's obligation to improve his lot. The paradox with which Byron confronts us is that the man who ardently tries to rid society of its moral confusion and unnecessary shackles also realizes that an ideal condition is unlikely to come about. Reconstruction of Eden, though they provide the goals toward which man must strive, are at best only temporary exceptions to the rule. Society, however, is not to be rejected or wholly condemned for its shortcomings any  more than is man for his predisposition to sin. As Byron comments in his peculiar dialectic of giving with one hand and taking with the other, "The world upon the whole is worth the assertion / (If but for comfort) that all things are kind" (DJ XII.41.3-4). However skeptical he may have been of establishing categorical truths and philosophical systems, his determination to understand mankind in a social setting not only counterbalances the negative thrusts but also affirms that humanity deserves amelioration.
--Frederick L. Beaty (1985)


[Don Juan] is... with Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Milton's Paradise Lost, and Wordsworth's The Prelude, one of the very greatest long poems in the English language. The things most frequently said about it—that it is the epic of modern life, the most original, funniest, but saddest of poems, one that never relinquishes its faith in what Helen Gardner once called "the salutariness of being undeceived"—are all true. If no one can write about Don Juan without writing about Byron himself as an overwhelming narrative presence, it is also limiting to write about Byron's life without writing about Don Juan: that "versified Aurora Borealis," as Byron himself described it in Canto VII, "which flashes o'er a waste and icy clime," a restless, "ever varying rhyme." This, even more than Childe Harold, and certainly more than the vault at Hucknall Torkard, is the place where the person who so mesmerized contemporaries not only in England but across Europe remains tangible and undimmed.
--Anne Barton (2002)

Don Juan reached the reading nation unmediated by the normal institutional, publishing, and price conventions. it penetrated more deeply and more widely within the reading nation, although not uniformly, and it continued to be feared, reprinted in large numbers, and widely read as a separate book right through the Victorian period. Few books reveal more vividly the differences between quantified histories of reading and traditional literary and cultural history seen as a parade or parliament of texts. As an example of literary diffusion, Don Juan is unique, an episode in which all the normal activities of authors, publishers, editors, printers, illustrators, reviewers, book buyers, and readers can be sen accelerated and intensified. It repays detailed study not only in its own right, but as a case study from which other more general lessons about the system of texts, books, readings, and cultural formation can be taken. Don Juan is the Galapagos Islands of literature.
---William St Clair (2004)