Lecture 12 Lord Byron课件.pptVIP

Lecture 12 Lord Byron Introduction to George Gordon Byron born in an impoverished noble family in London in 1788, a year before the French Revolution. His father was a captain nicknamed Mad Jack, who had squandered away the money of the poets mother and then deserted her. For some years mother and son lived in loneliness and poverty in Scotland. His mother, a passionate woman, petted and abused him alternately. Byron was born with a clubfoot, and in the frequent family scenes his mother called him you lame brat.” So the poets early years had been far from happy. In 1815, Byron married Miss Milbank, a solemnly religious young woman who made up her mind to reform Byron by marrying him. It proved a most unhappy marriage. A year later, shortly after the birth of their daughter Ada, she left him and refused to come back, saying that he was insane. Now the freedom-loving character of Byrons poetry and his seditious speeches in Parliament had long evoked hatred for him on the part of the English ruling classes. They grasped Byrons misfortune in family life as a pretext to launch a wholesale attack against him. I felt he wrote. that, if what was whispered, and mattered, and murmured, was true, I was unfit for England; if false, England was unfit for me. On April 25, 1816, he set sail for Europe, never to return. Byron first went to Switzerland, where he made acquaintance with Shelley. The two poets visited the castle of Chillon, in which the Swiss revolutionary Bonnivard (1496-1570) had been imprisoned for several years. Shortly afterwards Byron wrote the famous Sonnet on Chillon and the narrative poem The “Prisoner of Chillon(1816). In Switzerland he also wrote “Manfred” a poetical drama, and other poems. Introduction to His major Works “Childe Harolds Pilgrimage: This long poem contains four cantos. It is written in the Spenserian stanza, i.e. a 9-line stanza rhymed ababbcbcc, in which the first eight lines are in iambic pentameter while the ninth in ia