Description
BYRON
A Critical Study
Andrew Rutherford
Byron's poetry has only recently begun to receive the critical attention that is its due. His adventurous life and complex personality have nearly always tended to distract attention from his literary works, and most of the books so far written about him have been largely or wholly biographical in intention. The object of this study, on the other hand, is "to offer an account of Byron's career and achievement as a poet" and it presents no biographical material that is not strictly relevant to a critical assessment.
Mr. Rutherford, however, combines the methods of traditional scholarship with those of modern criticism to show how the strengths and weaknesses of Byron the man are mirrored in his works, and how our understanding of his poetry is increased if we see it in the context of his other interests and ambitions. The book gives an authoritative survey of Byron's poetic development, a searching critique of the romantic works that made him famous in his own day, and a sustained analysis of the great verse satires of hi's maturity- Beppo, Don luan, and The Vision of Judgment. In the course of this discussion Mr. Rutherford examines Byron's claims to greatness as a romantic and as a satiric poet, and fully substantiates his view that many of the characteristics of Byron's best poetry are due largely to the nature of his social experience – to the fact that he was primarily "no mere man of letters and romantic poet, but a sophisticated man of the world, a Regency aristocrat."
Mr. Rutherford is Lecturer in English at Edinburgh University.
This is a reproduction edition from a scanned copy of the original 1961 edition by Stanford University Press (ISBN 0804700710)
Tags:
stanford press, byron, rutherford, literary critism, biography, poetry, writing, english, irish, scottich, welch, don juan, beppo, the vision of judgment, romatic poetry 
