Robert Burns and Lord Byron: Scottish and English Romantic Poets, Dispense di Letteratura Inglese

Scarica Robert Burns and Lord Byron: Scottish and English Romantic Poets e più Dispense in PDF di Letteratura Inglese solo su Docsity! Robert Burns Robert Burns (Alloway, 25 January 1759 - Dumfries, 21 July 1796) was a Scottish poet and composer, the best known of those who wrote verse in the Scots language. Biography He was bom in Alloway, in Ayrshire, Scotland, from a farming family. Despite economic difficulties his father provided him with a teacher. Burns became at fifteen the main worker at the farm, to the point that the urge to write became for him an outlet and an escape from "his circumstances"; at this age he wrote his first poem, My Handsome Nell. Following the death of his father, Robert proved more interested in poetry than in running the farm with his brother Gilbert. So he prepared to flee to the West Indies. What saved him from becoming one of the many emigrants to the Americas was the publication in April 1786 of his first collection of poems, Poems - Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect. ‘The Poems had considerable success in his region, and earned him the attention of several wealthy nobles in the area; thanks to his success in letters, the poet was able to remain in Scotland. On July 4, 1781, at the age of 22, Burns was initiated into Freemasonry in St. David's Lodge No.174 and later affiliated with the Canongate Kilwinning Lodge in Edinburgh, the oldest active Masonic lodge in the world. His fame grew rapidly. The fame obtained within the elite was not a solution to the economic straits, so the poet began to exercise the profession of tax collector, however, continuing to write poems and traditional songs (in all we have about 600 compositions). In the 1800's and 1900's the songs composed by Burns and donated to the collections of James Johnson and George Thomson had a great diffusion in the United States, but since the poet's contribution had been mostly anonymous, no one knew that it was almost all the result of Robert Burns' compositional skills. His last years were dedicated to the composition of great works such as My love is like a red, red rose or the fantastic-legendary poem Tam o' Shanter. The strenuous work undertaken during his adolescence aggravated the effects of a heart disease that led to his death at only 37 years old. Over 10,000 people attended his funeral. However, this was little compared to the popularity the author achieved in Scotland. He is the "Scottish Bard" who is remembered by the entire nation every year on the anniversary of his birth. Lord Byron Lord Byron, in full George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, (bom January 22, 1788, London, England— died April 19, 1824, Missolonghi, Greece), British Romantic poet and satirist whose poetry and personality captured the imagination of Europe. He was called as the “gloomy egoist” of his autobiographical poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812-18) in the 19th century, he is now more generally esteemed for the satiric realism of Don Juan (1819-24). George Gordon Byron had been bom with a clubfoot and early developed an extreme sensitivity to his lameness. In 1798, at age 10, he unexpectedly inherited the title and estates of his great-uncle William, the 5th Baron Byron. His mother proudly took him to England, where the boy fell in love with the ghostly halls and spacious ruins of Newstead Abbey, which had been presented to the Byrons by Henry VIII. After living at Newstead for a while, Byron was sent to school in London, and in 1801 he went to Harrow, one of England’s most prestigious schools. In 1803 he fell in love with his distant cousin, Mary Chaworth, who was older and already engaged, and when she rejected him she became the symbol for Byron of idealized and unattainable love. He probably met Augusta Byron, his half sister from his fathers first marriage, that same year. In 1805 Byron entered Trinity College, Cambridge, where he piled up debts at an alarming rate and indulged in the conventional vices of undergraduates there. The signs of his incipient sexual ambivalence became more pronounced in what he later described as “a violent, though pure, love and passion” for a young chorister, John Edleston. Alongside Byron’s strong attachment to boys, often idealized as in the case of Edleston, his attachment to women throughout his life is an indication of the strength of his heterosexual drive. In 1806 Byron had his early poems privately printed in a volume entitled Fugitive Pieces. - Byron's first published volume of poetry, Hours of Idleness, appeared in 1807. A sarcastic critique of the book in The Edinburgh Review provoked his retaliation in 1809 with a couplet satire, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, in which he attacked the contemporary literary scene. This work gained him his first recognition. On the critical level, Byron mentions the Romantic poets of the first generation such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Scott, mocking in each of them the atrophy of the initial creative impulse. - From 1809 to 1811 Byron decided to do the Grand Tour through some countries. Byron’s sojourn in Greece made a lasting impression on him. The Greeks” free and open frankness contrasted strongly with English reserve and hypocrisy and served to broaden his views of men and manners. He delighted in the sunshine and the moral tolerance of the people. - In 1812 he began writing the first two cantos of the opera Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. It is a kind of diary in verse of the young Byron-Harold's Pilgrimage through the Mediterranean countries. In addition to the description of the journey, there was also a description of the traveler, that contemptuous "young Aroldo" who personifies the attitudes of Byron himself; - Inthe fourth, the poet lingers in Italy and speaks in the first person. Byron became famous and that's why he wrote more verse stories called "Turkish tales" such as The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair and so on. The structure of the tales is gothic where the protagonist appears as the stupendous being fallen in this world and that cannot be affected by the miseries and weaknesses. - The political radicalism, the incest and the practice of homosexuality, some amorous adventures and at the end the failure of marriage with Isabella Milbanke pushed the poet to leave England. - The poet settled in the villa Diodati in Switzerland former residence of Milton. In a villa not far away, in Montalègre, stayed Percy Bysshe Shelley, his future wife Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft with his half-sister Claire Clairmont. In contact with Percy Bysshe Shelley's delicate sensitivity to the beauties of nature, and stimulated each by the genius of the others, Byron composed in this environment the third canto of Childe Harold, the Prisoner of Chillon, The Dream, the first two acts of Manfred, and Darkness. The poetic fruits of such enrichment were also manifested in Mary Shelley, who began to write her novel Frankenstein here, and in Polidori, who conceived The Vampyre under Byron's influence. With Claire, Byron continued a relationship that had already begun in London a few months earlier; this stormy love affair generated, in January 1817, his daughter Allegra. - When Byron went to Italy he learned Italian, Venetian, and Armenian, and worked on the fourth canto of Childe Harold, Beppo, and the first two cantos of Don Juan, which made a furore in England, though published anonymously in 1819. When he arrived in Venice he found his own ideal of homeland. - Aftera few months, in January 1824 he moved to Missolonghi in Greece where he died, perhaps as a result of rheumatic fever, on April 19; near him he had the manuscript of the incomplete XVII canto of Don Juan. - Don Juan represents adventures that happen to the young Spanish nobleman in various parts of the Mediterranean and Russia. Major works * Hoursofldleness (1807) * LachinyGair(1807)