'He Thrived on Giving Offense'

Why did my teachers devote more class time to John Greenleaf Whittier and James Russell Lowell – American exemplars of the Age of Thrice-Named Writers -- than to Lord Byron? After more than half a century, I can only speculate. Literary patriotism? We spent a lot of time reading such certified American products as Ralph Waldo Emerson (not Thoreau), William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and "The Man Without a Country." In retrospect I can see this reading list had likely been in place for nearly a century. We dabbled in the English Romantic poets, especially Keats and Wordsworth, but no Byron. Was the taint of scandal still attached to his name? I’m not dismissing Whittier & Co. Most are minor writers in a young country. I want to address an imbalance. 

My late father-in-law left me a small library of books, including those he had won as prizes while a student at St. Andrew’s College in Aurora, Ontario. Among them is the Oxford edition of The Poetical Works of Lord Byron, the 1952 reprint, which he was awarded four years later. I’m using it to sample Byron, reading among his poems experimentally. I did something similar a few years ago with Robert Browning, another void in my education.

 

I do love Don Juan (1819-24), especially for its wit, occasional vulgarity and inspired rhymes. He is the inheritor of Alexander Pope’s gift. Take Canto I, Stanza 22:

 

"'T is pity learnéd virgins ever wed

With persons of no sort of education,

Or gentlemen, who, though well born and bred,

Grow tired of scientific conversation:

I don’t choose to say much upon this head,

I’m a plain man, and in a single station,

But — Oh! ye lords of ladies intellectual,

Inform us truly, have they not hen-peck’d you all?”

 

In Canto III, Stanza 88, Byron writes thoughtfully, colloquially, racily :

 

“But words are things; and a small drop of ink,

Falling, like dew, upon a thought, produces

That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think;

’T is strange, the shortest letter which man uses

Instead of speech, may form a lasting link     

Of ages; to what straits old Time reduces

Frail man, when paper — even a rag like this,

Survives himself, his tomb, and all that’s his.”

 

In a 2002 essay titled “My Roommate Lord Byron,” the Byronic poet Tom Disch writes:

 

“It would have pleased Lord Byron to know that, having been the most renowned, imitated, and execrated of the Major Romantic Poets, he is now, almost two centuries later, the least honored, the most ignored and deplored of that select few. For he thrived on giving offense. He was a sexy, swaggering contrarian whose wisecrack answer to the earnest inquiry of Concerned Virtue, ‘What are you rebelling against?,’ would have been the same as Marlon Brando’s: 'What have ya got?’”

 

I should have read Byron decades ago but I wouldn’t have recognized him as a lineal descendent of Dryden and Pope.