2. The peculiarities of lyro-epic poems in g. G. Byron’s literary work

Really I profoundly value only two men, Rabelais and Byron,

the only two who have written in a spirit of malice toward

the human race and with the intention of laughing in its face.

 Gustave Flaubert

The most flamboyant and notorious of the major Romantics, George Gordon, Lord Byron, was likewise the most fashionable poet of the day. He created an immensely popular Romantic hero – defiant, melancholy, haunted by secret guilt – for which, to many, he seemed the model. He is also a Romantic paradox: a leader of the era's poetic revolution, he named Alexander Pope as his master; a worshiper of the ideal, he never lost touch with reality; a deist and freethinker, he retained from his youth a Calvinist sense of original sin; a peer of the realm, he championed liberty in his works and deeds, giving money, time, energy, and finally his life to the Greek war of independence. His faceted personality found expression in satire, verse narrative, ode, lyric, speculative drama, historical tragedy, confessional poetry, dramatic monologue, seriocomic epic, and voluminous correspondence, written in Spenserian stanzas, heroic couplets, blank verse, terza rima, ottava rima, and vigorous prose. In his dynamism, sexuality, self-revelation, and demands for freedom for oppressed people everywhere, Byron captivated the Western mind and heart as few writers have, stamping upon nineteenth-century letters, arts, politics, even clothing styles, his image and name as the embodiment of Romanticism.

In 1828 Byron published two first parts (songs or cantos) of “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” and gained the immense popularity. The poem that gave life to the lyro-epic genre was created on the basis of the traveller’s diary of Byron himself. The invented image of disappointed in life Childe Harold appears in the beginning of it and gives a start to the intrigue by his black cloack and mere English spleen, but slowly the author put him aside and becomes the active participator. Thus, the epic line (travelling of Childe Harold itself) and the lyric one (author’s digressions) intersect to form the lyro-epic genre.

The poem has four cantos written in Spenserian stanzas, which consists of eight iambic pentameter lines followed by one alexandrine (a twelve syllable iambic line), and has rhyme pattern ABABBCBCC. Childe Harold became a vehicle for Byron's own beliefs and ideas; indeed in the preface to book three Byron acknowledges the fact that his hero is just an extension of himself. According to Jerome McGann, by masking himself behind a literary artifice, Byron was able to express his view that "man's greatest tragedy is that he can conceive of a perfection which he cannot attain".

Byron’s lyro-epic poem, which was not only one of the sources of English Romanticism but also one of the sources of world’s Romantic literature, originated from Pope’s Enlightment descriptive poem but opposed it in the same time. Byron experienced different kinds of satire and dydactism in his poems and the Spenserian stanzas gave possibility to reveal certain distance between the author and the protagonist, denying Byron contemporary critics’ thought about the author and the the protagonist being one. As for the author’s intention, Childe Harold was the connecting element of different episodes of the poem. There are some similarities between the two, but Byron is better knowledgeable about life and people and that’s why his protagonist came beyond the pages of the poem evaluating and comprehending the universes’s problems and events.

There was also a strong connection between Byron’s lyro-epic poem and English ballad tradition. The manifested old form of the verse includes the elements of irony along with the fact that the main hero being involved into the revolutionary European events is quite archaic. Novelty of this kind of a poem touched the style and language of it. Byron looked through all the arsenal of expressive means and stylistic devices of the English language, choosing all the necessary – like principle of allegory, known since the Middle Ages, as well as usage of folk English that gave him all the richness of the native language for the dynamic plot of his poems.

Lord Byron’s works’ satirical tendency developed in various genres - poems, epigrams, parodies, satirical epitaphs, impromptues. Comical elements were inherently combined with tragical ones especially in the genre of lyro-epic poem, which gave more opportunities for artistic depiction of life. This was expressed with deeper representation of the personality’s inner world, his or her passions and anxieties, their lyrical contemplations on the fates of mankind and peoples.

In addition, English Romanticism having co-existed with the Clacissism and the Enlightment by 1816-1817 started to break off with didactic discriptiveness. Lyro-epic poem was an important link in the development of the Romanticism. Moreover the theme of political and other kinds of struggle became one of the main in this period, especially it flourished in the so called “Oriental poems”.

1. Oriental poems

Between June 1813 and February 1816, Byron completed and had published these six extremely popular verse tales, five of them influenced by his travels in Greece and Turkey: The Giaour (June 1813), The Bride of Abydos (December 1813), The Corsair (February 1814), Lara (August 1814), and The Siege of Corinth and Parisina (February 1816). Walter Scott had created the market for Romantic narratives in verse, but Byron outrivaled him to the extent that Scott gave up the genre in favor of novel writing; Waverley appeared in 1814.

Byron commented ironically on the success of these works in his 1818 poem Beppo:

Oh! that I had the art of easy writing       What should be easy reading! . . . How quickly would I print (the world delighting)       A Grecian, Syrian, or Assyrian tale; And sell you, mixed with western Sentimentalism, Some samples of the finest Orientalism.

French painter Eugène Delacroix used the story as the inspiration of his 1827 painting Combat of the Giaour and the Pasha. The poem was an influence on the early work of Edgar Allan Poe. His first major poem, "Tamerlane", particularly emulates both the manner and style of The Giaour.

The protagonist of the “oriental poems” by Byron – is usually a rebel-individualist, rejecting all the law and order of proprietor’s society. This is the typical romantic hero, which can be characterized by the Это типичный романтический герой, его характеризуют exceptionality of personal fate, great passions, unbending will, and tragic love. His ideal is individualistic and anarchic freedom. One should search the reason of Byron’s laudation of individualistic revolt not only in the spiritual drama of the author himself, but also in the very epoch, having given birth to the cult of Individualism.

However, by the time of their appearance this contradiction of the “oriental poems” was not so obvious. Then, in 1813-1816 something else seemed to be more important – the passionate appeal for action, struggle, which Byron via his furious heroes proclaimed to be the essence of existance. Contemporaries were deeply moved by the thoughts of “oriental poems” about lost in modern society people’s abilities and talents. Thus, e.g. one of the protagonists of the “oriental poems” is sorry for his “unspent gigantic strengths”, the other one, Conrad, was born with the heart capable of “great goodness”, which was not to be accomplished. One more, Selim, is poignantly oppressed by his inaction.

These heroes act as judges and avengers for outraged human honour and dignity – they long for destruction of chains, casted on a person by other people. Composition and style of the “oriental poems” are typical for Romantic art. The location is notdefinite, but in most cases the events take place on the background of spectacular exotic nature – there are always descriptions of endless blue sea, wild rocks, fairy-talelike mountainious valleys. It’s not worth looking for some precise country description as it could be done in “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” though. Each one of the “oriental poems” is a story expressed in verse with the destiny of some romantic hero in its essence. The entire author’s attention is concentrated at exposing the inner world of this hero, showing all the depth of his passions. In comparison to “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”, the 1813-1816 poems differ with plot completeness and the protagonist being not only the linking unit between different parts of the poem, but also being the main object of it. Poet doesn’t describe general citizens’ events, doesn’t give political assessment of current events, any collective national images – the remonstrance in poems is pure abstract.

Plot structure is characterized by fragmentariness, piling up of sudden details, many reservation, and meaningful hints. One can guess the motives of the heroes’ deeds, but very often it is difficult or impossible to understand who is he, where is he from and what is waiting him ahead. An action usually starts from some point right from the middle of all of it or even the end and only then it becomes clear what was happening before.

Using English rhimed pentameter for most of the “oriental poems”, Byron saturated it with new stylistic devices, which allowed him to achieve the top of action depiction expressiveness, hero’s mood shades, nature description, inner human anxieties. He is free to address a reader with questions, broadly uses exclamatory sentences, builds his plots in alogical way (opposite to that of Classicist poets) according to heroes’ characters and mood.