Lord Byron: biografia e opere in inglese

Lord Byron: riassunto schematico della biografia e delle opere del poeta appartenente alla seconda generazione del Romanticismo inglese (5 pagine formato doc)

Appunto di ilariamarengon

LORD BYRON BIOGRAFIA

George Gordon Byron.

Life. Byron was born in 1788 and died in 1824.  His family was an aristocratic one. He attended Cambridge University. He wasn’t a quit person:

- He used to be drunk
- He used to gamble.
He had an intellectual personality. Byron was witty so he was intelligent and funny. He had a satyrical spirit which was tipical of the 1800 century in literature.
Byron was a rebal, in fact his deside was to fight against something that was different from he wanted.

In 1807 Byron published Hours of Idleness, a small volume of lyric poems about his spare time. From this we understand that Byron had a double personality: he was a cultural man to the public and a rebel in the private one.
This first volume was reason of scandal because it showed a new type of intellectual. This was the reason why he was criticised. Byron aswered to this critics by publishing in 1808 “English Bards and Scotch reviewrs” were he showed his taste for satire.
In 1809-1812 he started travelling and he made grandtour, a very long journey that took four years among Spain, Portugal, Malta, Albania, Greece, Middle East.
 

LORD BYRON POESIE

From that experience he gathered the ideas which inspired the first two cantos of his main work “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” which he published once he returned to England in 1812.
Thanks to those cantos he became a literary celebrity and he was well known everywhere. He described new places, exotic settings and descriptions of foreign customs.  
For this reason he satisfied the public desire and taste.
In 1815 Byron married Annabella Milbanke but his marriage finished after one year because of his incestous relationship with his half sister Augusta Legh.
Surrounded by scandal and debts he left England in 1816 never to return.
He moved to Geneva where he became close friend to Shelley and here he wrote the third canto of Childe Harold’s Pirlgrimage in 1816. Than moved to Venice where he wrote the fourth canto in 1818.
In 1817 he moved as an exile to Switzerland and Italy.
 

DON JUAN LORD BYRON

In 1817 he wrote the tragedy Mandred and he began his masterpiece the mock-epic Don Juan (1818-1824).
In 1819 he moved to Milan and he went to Pisa to join Shelley. After Shelley’s death he decided to move to Greece and join the greek battle for the independence from Turchey.
Byron died in 1824 in Missolonghi.
His heart is buried in Greece where he is a national hero but his body is interred in the family tomb in England.
Byron was the first who had a great influence on the european people and he exerted a significant influence on other writers such as Goethe, Balzac, Dostoevsky, Pushkin.
He never considered himself ad a romantic poet and he criticised Wordsworth and Coleridge.
He hated any sort of constraint, he wished to be himself without compromises. He wanted all men to be free.
He was constrained so that he had an individual liberty and that was the reason why he felt isolated, alone with his ideas. From this loneliness he started looking at nature which is not a tranquil restoration but a reflection of his feelings, a mirror of his feelings.
From this conception of nature, he loved describing storms and oceans. He lived a sense of struggle against polical and social orders. By using the witty style he denounced the evils of society.
He didn’t need to go beyond nature as it was for Wordsworth and Coleridge because he considered nature as a mirror of his feelings. His feelings were reflected in the wildest and most exotic natural landscapes.
He described sunsets not as something that had a deeperd meaning but something which is different from the struggle of the poet.
 
 

BYRON OPERE E STILE

STYLE - Byron thought that English poetry was died with the writer Pope in 1800. For this reason his style and themes are linked to the old poetry, the 1800 poetry.
He used the spenserian stanza which consists of 9 lines the first 8 lines are written in iambic pentameter, the 9 line in iambic hexameter. The spenserian stanza was used in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.
He used the ottava rima which is 8 line stanza rhyming ABABABCC, in Don Juan.
Byron was like a bridge beetwen the old period (style) and the one which is living (themes).
He is a point beetwen past and modern age. He is one of the second group of romantic authors who are linked to the future. ïÂÃ?Æ?  period beetwen tradition and innovation, period of rebellions and revolts (reactions of poets).