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Lord Byron: Don Juan in Hell
- btilly 8y agoByron was a fascinating person. See https://publicdomainreview.org/2014/10/16/the-poet-the-physician-and-the-birth-of-the-modern-vampire/ https://publicdomainreview.org/2014/10/16/the-poet-the-physi... for the story of how the modern vampire was based on his personal physician's opinion of Byron.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ShabbosGoy 8y ago> I never loved nor pretended to love her—but a man is a man—& if a girl of eighteen comes prancing to you at all hours—there is but one way. Truer words were never spoken.
- pmoriarty 8y agoAlso see George Bernard Shaw's Don Juan in Hell (a scene from Man and Superman often performed as a one-act play). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_and_Superman#Don_Juan_in_Hell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_and_Superman#Don_Juan_in_H...
- JohnJamesRambo 8y agoI never knew Byron was such a dick until reading this. I don't find it all romantic or exciting at all, just a sad account of an untreated person with bipolar disorder.
- Mediterraneo10 8y agoI recently read that there was a surge in Lord Byron’s popularity in the USA in the 1920s and 1930s. I find that so hard to believe. It must have simply vanished from American consciousness without a trace after the war (Stefan Zweig’s novels are a similar case). How many American schoolchildren in the last several decades read any Byron? Even at the university level, I never read him directly, I only heard some things about him that were mainly negative, like his sexism, or his role in insisting that a newly independent Greece revive the Ancient Greek culture that Western Europeans expected from it, when it fact Greece had been a deeply Orthodox Christian society for 1500 years and all those pagan gods and Athenian or Spartan values had long been forgotten.
- jeffinpdx 8y agoMany AP English classes teach Byron. Many an English teacher loves a hater like Byron
- cafard 8y agoFor what value of "last several"? Honestly, I'm not at this point sure whether I read any Byron in high school English. I have the impression that he was very popular in the US curriculum until the modernists devalued the romantics.
- dragonwriter 8y ago> How many American schoolchildren in the last several decades read any Byron? I did in the late 1980s, which at three decades sago is within the minimum span that could be intended by “several”.
- fernly 8y agoSome years ago I worked on 6 of the 7 volumes of The Works of Lord Byron for the Project Gutenberg editions [1], which entailed careful reading of every line. Which led to reading the Fiona McCarthy biography. Yeah, he was a shit no doubt, but he had an astounding, rarely-equalled talent as well. Verse just poured out of him. He had a high intelligence and great sensitivity to emotional nuance -- those are common enough qualities -- but was utterly unique in that, whatever he thought, he could express in perfectly-chosen words fit to exact meter and rhyme. [1] http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=works+of+lord+byron http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=works+of+lord+... [2] https://smile.amazon.com/Byron-Life-Legend-Fiona-MacCarthy/dp/0374186294 https://smile.amazon.com/Byron-Life-Legend-Fiona-MacCarthy/d...