英美文学：部分作家介绍和评论—Lord Byron

　　Lord Byron (1788-1824)

　　Unhappy childhood; developed an uneven temper, a bitter and cynic attitude to life; Pessimistic and fatalistic from childhood.

　　“I have always believed that all things depend upon Fortune and nothing upon ourselves”..

　　Hours of Idleness (1807), melancholic and sentimental, the message of lost innocence, lost youth, lost hope. “I consider myself as destined never to be happy, I am an isolated being on earth without a tie to attach me to life, except a few school fellows and a score of females.”

　　English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, a counter-attack on Edinburgh Review, in which he satirized and attacked nearly all the romantic poets like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Scott, Southey.

　　Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812) “Awoke one morning and found he was famous”. Made his first speech in the House of Lords in 1812, opposing the Frame-breaking Bill and defending the workers who smashed the mechanical looms.

　　Oriental Tales (1813-1814), the Bride of Abydos, The Corsair, the Giaour and Lara, verse romances based on the mythologies in the Middle East.

　　Married Annabella Milbanke in 1815; the marriage proved disastrous; left England in 1816, vowing never to return; went to Greece In 1823; formed the Byronic brigade; died in 1824 of fever at 36.

　　The last two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Manfred, Cain, two verse drama, A Vision of Judgment, a long satire and Don Juan, his masterpiece and other poems.

　　Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

　　A long narrative poem in 4 cantos, written between 1812-1818, based on his personal experience; describing a gloomy passionate young man who escaped from the society he disliked and traveled around the continent, seeking for freedom; full of all kinds of recognizable features of romantic poetry: the medieval, the outcast figure, love of nature, hatred of tyranny, passion for freedom, sympathy for the oppressed, preoccupation with the remote and primitive etc;

　　Childe Harold is the first Byronic hero.

　　Written in Spenserian stanza: nine-lined stanza, with first 8 lines in iambic pentameter followed by an alexandrine ( a line of 6 iambic feet), rhyming ababbcbcc.

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