Byron

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 interest 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 his maturity -- Beppo, Don Juan, and The Vision of Judgement. 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 following original edition:
Title Byron: a critical study
Author Andrew Rutherford
Publisher Stanford University Press, 1961
ISBN 0804700710, 9780804700719
Length 253 pages


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