Selected Poems (155 page)
As for other of Byron’s additions and interpolations to the source material: the spectre of Sardanapalus’s ancestor, Semiramis, derives from popular accounts of her monstrosity. In contrast, Voltaire’s
Semiramis
(1748), a play that Byron may have known, gives a sympathetic representation of this incestuous queen, casting her as a kind of tormented Byronic hero. The other female characters are Byron’s invention. Zarina’s name was taken from another account in Diodorus, of a female ruler of a central Asian tribe, a warrior, a beauty, and ultimately a humanitarian civilizer. The character of Myrrha was inspired by Teresa Guiccioli’s request for a heroic play involving love. Her name is also that of the incestuously passionate heroine in Book X of Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
, on which Alfieri based Mirra (1788), a play that greatly agitated Byron when he saw it performed in 1819 (BLJ, Vol. 6, p. 206), perhaps because its theme of consummated illicit desire was too close to his affair with his half-sister Augusta. Myrrha’s incest inverts that of Semiramis, the incestuous mother: donning a disguise, she has sex with her father. Her story is hinted at very tangentially in Byron’s play in the ‘myrrh’ that Sardanapalus orders for the funeral pyre to which he and his Myrrha commit themselves: in Ovid, Myrrha is changed into the myrrh tree when she begs the gods to relieve her of her agonies as she gives birth to her child by her father.
Criticism has traditionally described Sardanapalus as a mixture of voluptuary and doomed idealist (a pacifist and pleasure-lover in a culture that
values military imperialism), or yet another version of Byron and the latest serial variation on the Byronic hero. For these themes, see, in Byron’s day, Reginald Heber, ‘Lord Byron’s Dramas’, in the
Quarterly Review,
and Francis Jeffrey, ‘Lord Byron’s Tragedies’, in the
Edinburgh Review,
and the modern elaborations in Jerome J. McGann’s Fiery Dust, Leslie A. Marchand’s
Byron’s
Poetry, and G. Wilson Knight’s ‘The Two Eternities’. More recent studies have focused on social performance (Jerome J. McGann, ‘Hero with a Thousand Faces’); political ideologies (Daniel P. Watkins, ‘Violence in Byron’s History Plays’; Jerome Christensen,
Lord Byron’s Strength;
Marilyn Butler, ‘John Bull’s Other Kingdom’) and gender (Peter J. Manning,
Byron
and his Fictions;
Gordon Spence, ‘Moral and Sexual Ambivalence’; Susan Wolfson, ‘A Problem Few Dare Imitate’; Diane Long Hoeveler,
Romantic Androgyny;
Caroline Franklin,
Byron’s
Heroines
). For representations of
Sardanapalus
in pictorial art and on the nineteenth-century stage, see Barry Weller’s essay in CPW (Vol. 6, pp. 584–5) and Margaret Howell,
Byron Tonight.
The fall 1992 issue of
Studies in Romanticism
(31, Part 3) is devoted to the play, including an account of a performance at Yale University in 1990.
Who kill’d John Keats?
A squib in a letter of July 1821; first published in Moore, 1830. Byron had used the key rhyme in
Don Juan
I in his mock complaint about the way Scotch reviews and the
‘Quarterly
/Treat a dissenting author very martyrly‘ (stanza CCXI).
In April 1821, a dismayed Shelley reported to Byron, ‘Young Keats… died lately at Rome from the consequences of breaking a blood-vessel, in paroxysms of despair at the contemptuous attack on his book [
Endymion
, 1818] in the
Quarterly Review.’
He was misinformed: Keats was stung, but not fatally, by the reviews; it was tuberculosis that killed him in February 1821. Byron was frankly incredulous: ‘is it
actually true?
I did not think criticism had been so killing… Poor fellow!… in this world of bustle and broil, and especially in the career of writing, a man should calculate upon his powers of resistance before he goes into the arena’ (26 April 1821; BLJ, Vol. 8, p. 103). More snidely, he wrote to Murray in the letter containing these verses that the who would die of an article in a review – would probably have died of something else equally trivial’ (BLJ, Vol. 8, pp. 162–3). The other writers mentioned in these verses are Henry Milman, a poet, ecclesiastical scholar and vicar (‘Jew Milman’ Byron called him elsewhere; BLJ, Vol. 8, p. 228); John Barrow, a travel writer who published frequently in the
Quarterly Review;
and the
poet laureate Robert Southey, whom Shelley (wrongly) suspected as the
Quarterly executioner.
An elegy on Keats that Byron did publish, in Canto XI of
Don Juan
(1823), proved so quotable that it gained an immediate and lasting influence, at least equal to that of Shelley’s
Adonais:
‘John Keats… was killed off by one critique,/Just as he really promised something great,/… /Poor fellow! His was an untoward fate: – /’Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle,/Should let itself be snuffed out by an Article’ (stanza LX).
THE BLUES: A Literary Eclogue
Written August 1821. The piece was too short for Murray to publish separately, and he frustrated Byron by holding on to it for two years, after which Byron gave it to the Hunts, who published it in April 1823 as the front piece in the third issue of the
Liberal.
Its reception was affected by reviewers’ political abuse of the
Liberal,
and it was not reprinted until 1831, in the first edition of the collected Works.
The title refers to the ‘Bluestockings’, a derisive term for women, primarily from the professional and upper-middle classes, who, instead of confining themselves to the routine female gatherings for card-playing, frivolous ‘accomplishments’ and gossip, attended intellectual and literary salons (the name derived from one of the literary lions often invited to read works or lecture to these salons, Benjamin Stillingfleet, who wore blue rather than the customary white stockings of male dress). Such salons developed in the mid eighteenth century; Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the ‘Queen of the Blues’, founded the first; others in attendance included Elizabeth Robinson Montagu, Elizabeth Carter, Elizabeth Vesey, Hester Chapone and Frances Boscawen. Because women were typically denied higher education and never admitted to universities, these clubs were a vital resource for their intellectual life, and helped to bring a number of women writers into the literary culture. In Byron’s day, the two women writers most associated with this culture were Hannah More and Anna Laetitia Barbauld. Byron despised both.
Jerome J. McGann gives a plausible key to Byron’s characters (
CPW,
Vol. 6, pp. 665–6): Inkel is Byron himself; Tracy is Moore; Miss Lilac is Byron’s estranged wife, the mathematical Annabella Milbanke; Scamp is Coleridge (the scene is Coleridge’s London lectures of 1811–12, some of which Byron attended; Hazlitt’s 1818 lectures may also figure in the representation); Botherby is William Sotheby, a minor poet and man of letters; the Bluebottles are Byron’s friends and political mentors, Lord and Lady Holland; Lady Bluemount is Lady Beaumont, a friend of
Wordsworth (‘Wordswords’), whose poetry Byron ridicules along with that of other Lake poets, in particular Southey (‘Mouthey’). The epigraph is from Virgil’s Eclogue II: ‘Do not believe too much in colouring,’ the shepherd Corydon moans in solitude to the beautiful boy Alexis, whom he adores, but who has rejected him for his own master, who also adores him.
Don Juan
and
Beppo
include other parodies and lampoons of the Blues (see Jerome J. McGann’s list,
CPW,
Vol. 6, p. 666). Byron told Murray that he ‘scratched off’ this eclogue as ‘a mere buffoonery – to quiz [ridicule] “the Blues” ’, and he sarcastically urged him to publish it ‘
anonymously
… don’t let my name out – for the present – or I shall have all the old women in London about my ears – since it sneers at the solace of their antient Spinsterstry’ (7 August;
BL
J, Vol. 8, p. 172). The contempt, as well as the linking of female intelligence to sexual frustration, was a common tone; the general commentary and the parodies and satires in which it sounds are impressive for crossing the class lines that mark other social antipathies. Dr Johnson called the Bluestockings ‘Amazons of the pen’ (
The Adventurer,
December 1753); Moore wrote a comic operetta titled
M.P. or The Blue-Stocking
(1811), which lampooned the pretensions and clumsy arts of scientific women; Keats ‘detest[ed]’ these women for their lack of ‘real feminine Modesty’, despised the thought of his being read by them (letter, 21 September 1817), and longed to upset the ‘drawling bluestocking world’ (letter, 14 August 1819); Hazlitt expressed his ‘utter aversion’ to them (
Table-Talk
XXIII, ‘On Great and Little Things’). There were a few late revisions of this discourse: in 1827, William P. Scargil’s
Blue-Stocking Hall
praised literary women; a decade later, as a complement to his all-male
Feast of the Poets,
Leigh Hunt celebrated them in
Blue-Stocking Revels; or, The Feast of the Violets,
suggesting that the colour be redeemed as ‘viole’ for women, and that ‘blue‘ henceforth be ‘confined to the masculine, vain, and absurd’.
THE VISION OF JUDGMENT
Written 20 September-4 October 1821; Byron sent Murray
The Vision of Judgment
on 4 October, but Murray, alarmed by the outcry over the blasphemy of
Don Juan
(1819) and
Cain
, published in December 1821, hesitated, and in July 1822 Byron withdrew it. The poem was printed anonymously in the first number of the
Liberal
(15 October 1822), the journal on which Byron collaborated with Leigh Hunt and Percy Shelley. The reviews were hostile, and John Hunt, the publisher, was found guilty of
lèse-majesté
in 1824 (Byron’s estate paid the £100 damages).
George III died on 29 January 1820; on 11 April 1821 Robert Southey, the poet laureate, published
A Vision of Judgement
, recounting in unrhymed hexameters the poet’s vision of the dead king’s ascent to Heaven, where he confounds his former antagonists, John Wilkes and ‘Junius’ (today thought to be Philip Francis), pseudonymous author of letters (1769–71) attacking the government, is welcomed by former monarchs of England and great figures of English history, and reunited with his family. To Byron, Southey’s
Vision
exemplified the worst of the Lake School: bad verse defended upon ‘system’, and turncoat politics, further displayed in the fulsome dedication to George IV. The pirated publication in 1817 of Southey’s radical drama of 1794,
Wat Tyler
, made clear the reversal of the laureate’s revolutionary youth. Byron determined to ‘put the said George’s Apotheosis in a Whig point of view, not forgetting the Poet Laureate for his preface and his other demerits’ (
BLJ
, Vol. 8, p. 229). In his Preface Southey declared that the ‘publication of a lascivious book is one of the worst offences which can be committed against the well-being of society’, and denounced the men ‘of diseased hearts and depraved imaginations’ who made up what he termed ‘the Satanic school’, concluding: ‘Let rulers of the state look to this, in time!’ Byron, already angry in his conviction that Southey had spread rumours about his conduct in Switzerland (see note to
Manfred
), could not miss the allusion. He began a rejoinder on 7 May, but laid it aside, instead condemning Southey’s ‘cowardly ferocity’ and ‘impious impudence’ in a note to
The Two Foscari
, published 19 December 1821. To this Southey replied in a letter to the
Courier
on 5 January, not knowing that his counsel, ‘when he attacks me again let it be in rhyme’, had been anticipated by Byron’s return to his poem in late September. In signing himself ‘Quevedo Redivivus‘ Byron invoked as precedent Francisco Gomez de Quevedo y Villegas, the Spanish satirist whose
Sueños
attacked the court corruption of his day. The influence of
Paradise Lost
, by way of parody as well as allusion, is apparent throughout. Byron’s
Vision
follows Southey’s in citing some of the king’s chief opponents, John Wilkes (ll. 521–68), ‘Junius’ (ll. 593–668), and two writers Byron’s contemporaries thought might be hiding behind the pseudonym (l. 631), Edmund Burke and John Horne Tooke, a radical philologist.
Southeys appearance in his own poem invited Byron to follow suit, having Southey expose himself as ‘a pen of all work’ (1. 797), the indiscriminate author of the radical
Wat Tyler
, the conservative
Battle of Blenheim
(1800) and
The Poet’s Pilgrimage to Waterloo
(1816) (1. 768), and a
Life
(1820) of the Methodist John Wesley (1.. 785). The scorn is the aristocra’s for the professional author (see note to
Beppo
). At the same time, Byron avoids the presumption for which he berates Southey in the Preface, of ‘deal[ing] about his judgments in the next world’. In contrast to Southey’s
apotheosis, in his
Vision
George III ‘slipp’d’ into heaven: the hundredth psalm that he is ‘practising’ at the conclusion praises the Lord’s everlasting mercy (11. 846–8).
Epigraph:
The Merchant of Venice
(IV.i.222, 340).
Criticism: Malcolm Kelsall,
Byron’s Politics
, on the Whig heritage of the poem, and Stuart Peterfreund, ‘The Politics of “Neutral Space” ’, on the contemporary context; William H. Marshall on the
Liberal
; Emrys Jones, ‘Byron’s Visions of Judgement’, on the literary traditions; Peter T. Murphy, ‘Visions of Success’, on metre, poetry and politics in the two
Visions
and Byron’s
Cain
; and Andrew Rutherford,
Byron:
A Critical Study
, who acclaims the
Vision
as ‘Byron’s masterpiece’; on the shifty dynamics around the notion of ‘Author’, see Susan J. Wolfson in
The Cambridge Companion to Lord Byron
, ed. Drummond Bone.
