Byron, Lord - Jerome J. McGann (essay date fall 1992)

Jerome J. McGann (essay date fall 1992)

SOURCE: McGann, Jerome J. “Hero with a Thousand Faces: The Rhetoric of Byronism.” Studies in Romanticism 31, no. 3 (fall 1992): 295-313.

[In the following essay, McGann contends that the dramatic form allowed Byron to express his personal, spiritual, and social concerns.]

I did not, when a slave, understand the deep meaning of those rude and apparently incoherent songs. I was myself within the circle; so that I neither saw nor heard as those without might see and hear.

(Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave)

And feeling, in a poet, is the source
Of others' feeling; but they are such liars,
And take all colours—like the hands of dyers.

(Don Juan III, st. 87)

I saw, that is, I dream'd myself
Here—here—even where we are, guests as we were,
Myself a host that deem'd himself but guest,
Willing to...

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