Three kinds of study have been performed on Byron. There is the biographical study—the very valuable examination of Byron’s psychology and the events in his life; Escarpit’s 1958 work is an example of this kind of study, and biographers to this day continue to speculate about Byron’s life. Equally valuable is the of Shakespeare’s, without wondering what events or circumstances in his life prompted him to write it.
No doubt the fact that most of Byron’s poems cannot be convincingly read as subtle verbal creations indicates that Byron is not a “great” poet. It must be admitted too that Byron’s literary craftsmanship is irregular and often his temperament disrupts even his lax literary method (although the result, an absence of a genuine reason for reading a poet should think carefully about why we read Donne’s sonnets.
It is Byron and Byron’s idea of himself that hold his work together (and that enthralled early-nineteenth-century Europe). Different characters speak in his poems, but finally it is usually he himself who is speaking: a far cry from the impersonal poet Keats. Byron’s poetry alludes to Greek and Roman myth in the performance, and to shut out Byron the man is to fabricate a work of pseudocriticism.
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