Book Description
Excerpt from Lord Byron; Arnold and Swinburne Was it any wonder that these masters of cunning technique, gold smiths who could carve and chase with the art of a Benvenuto Cellini cups and chalices of antique fashion, or the lesser moulders of ballads in blue china, fragrant with the pot-pourri of the'romantic Middle Ages, were startled and indignant when commanded to do reverence to the crudities of Byron's earliest verses, the flamboyant improvisations of his verse tales and even of the greater Childe Harold, supported by short selections from the rich and abounding life of that shocking and delightful poem Don Juan, that great epic of modern Europe? Allxattempts to rehabilitate Byron, Professor Saintsbury felt able to declare in 1896, 'have certainly never yet succeeded either with the majority of competent critics or with the majority of readers of poetry'. And in his vivacious record of personal adventures in the French novel he tells us roundly that while Byronism did much mischief on the Continent, with us, though it made a great stir, it really did little harm except to some silly women. Counter-jumpers like Thackeray's own Pogson worshipped the noble poet boys of nobler stamp like Tennyson thought they worshipped him, but if they were going to become men of affairs forgot all about him; if they were to be poets took to Keats and Shelley as models, not to him. Critics hardly took h1m seriously, except for non-literary reasons. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.