EVERYMAN'S POETRY This new series of the world's greatest poetry features the hallmarks of Everyman top-quality production and reader-friendly design along with helpful notes and critiques. Each edition is also a great value, especially for those readers beginning to explore the work of this remarkable poet.
George Gordon Byron (invariably known as Lord Byron), later Noel, 6th Baron Byron of Rochdale FRS was a British poet and a leading figure in Romanticism. Amongst Byron's best-known works are the brief poems She Walks in Beauty, When We Two Parted, and So, we'll go no more a roving, in addition to the narrative poems Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Don Juan. He is regarded as one of the greatest British poets and remains widely read and influential, both in the English-speaking world and beyond.
Byron's notabilty rests not only on his writings but also on his life, which featured upper-class living, numerous love affairs, debts, and separation. He was notably described by Lady Caroline Lamb as "mad, bad, and dangerous to know". Byron served as a regional leader of Italy's revolutionary organization, the Carbonari, in its struggle against Austria. He later travelled to fight against the Ottoman Empire in the Greek War of Independence, for which Greeks revere him as a national hero. He died from a fever contracted while in Messolonghi in Greece.
My days are in the yellow leaf The flowers and fruits of love are gone — The worm, the canker and the grief Are mine alone.
I love me a pensive, heartbroken Byron. I wish this book featured more of his short poems but a bulk of it (more than half) are lines from Childe Harold and Don Juan, which I didn't enjoy.
Accompanying notes are short and sufficient however.
Truthfully, I'm not super impressed with Byron's poetry. He has several really good ones here and there, and the rest of it is just... eh. I mean, for my personal taste, it's just not what I am looking for in poetry. I can recognize his genius in a general way, but most of the poetry in this collection was not my cup of tea.
Still, there were several poems that I really loved! Byron definitely has a way with words, and there is a powerful emotional pull to almost everything he writes.
I got interested in Byron's poems through 'She Walks In Beauty', which is one of my all time favourite poems. I was saddened to see that the poems selected in this collection do not live up to my favourite. I prefer shorter poems and this collection seemed to focus on the longer ones which took up 10 odd pages. However, I did like the Epistle for Augusta :)