Scarica Lord Byron (vita e Byronic hero) e la natura dell'Augustan age e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! 1)Lord Byron was born in 1788 and came from a Scottish family of lords. He attended a grammar school and Cambridge, where he spent his time gambling and drinking, this won him a reputation. In 1809 he set out on his Grand Tour (visiting Spain, Portugal, Malta, Albania, Greece and the Middle East) When he returned to England, in 1812, he published the first 2 cantos of Childe Harold, which were based on his experiences. He immediately became famous, the public really appreciated these cantos and his other works (The Giaour, The Corsair and Lara) because of their exotic settings and the description of foreign customs. In 1815 he married Annabella Milkbanke, but it wasn’t a successful marriage because of his relationship with his half-sister. The scandal obliged him to leave England in 1816, moving to Geneva, where he met his friend Shelley, wrote the third canto of Childe Harold and began writing Manfred (the Swiss Alps mirror Manfred's loneliness). He then moved to Venice in 1818 where he wrote the fourth and last canto of Childe Harold . The following year he moved to Milan where he helped to fight for Italian freedom, then to Pisa, but when Shelley died he felt like his life wasn’t worth living anymore, so he committed himself to the Greek struggle, fighting for independence from Turkey. He died in Missolonghi in 1824 of smallpox. With Byron we have a new type of hero, which we can find for the first time in Childe Harold. The Byronic hero is an outcast of society, proud, brave, handsome, moody, of noble birth but wild in his manners. He is haunted by remorse, he probably did something bad. The difference between the Romantic hero and the Byronic hero is that the latter has more negative aspects. If Byron’s themes were Romantic, he preferred using the 18th century poetic diction and was Augustan in his form as his works were extremely difficult to read. He used the Spenserian stanza but also the ‘ottava rima’. 2) In the Augustan age Nature was seen as the supreme organiser. This changes with the romantic revolution, nature is described as a living creature endowed with feelings and passion. In the romantic age we can find 2 generations: Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge were first-generation poets; these poets embraced the ideas of the french revolution but rejected the bleak outcomes (reign of terror, napoleonic wars) and described nature as a growing, positive entity using the words once used to describe God. Byron, Shelley and Keats were second-generation poets who were rebellious, lived in exile and linked nature with the ideas of the sublime and the supernatural. In Wordsworth’s poems we can find nature as the countryside (pleasure for men, escape from reality), as a source of inspiration for men (we are part of nature, feelings are inspired by nature) and as a life-force (these things seem to have a life of their own). Lord Byron states that he can find knowledge of himself only in nature, which is not a source of consolation and joy, but reflects men’s feelings. For example, in “Manfred” we can find a man who feels he has more to do with nature than humanity, he sympathises with nature. Then we can also focus on “Apostrophe to the Ocean” where he describes the ocean as sublime, powerful, something that will always win, outliving humanity. We can see nature with our external eye but feel nature through imagination (inward/inner eye) (emotion recollected in tranquillity).
