
Lord Byron: Don Juan in Hell - whocansay
https://www.weeklystandard.com/algis-valiunas/lord-byron-don-juan-in-hell
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fernly
Some years ago I worked on 6 of the 7 volumes of The Works of Lord Byron for
the Project Gutenberg editions [1], which entailed careful reading of every
line. Which led to reading the Fiona McCarthy biography. Yeah, he was a shit
no doubt, but he had an astounding, rarely-equalled talent as well. Verse just
poured out of him. He had a high intelligence and great sensitivity to
emotional nuance -- those are common enough qualities -- but was utterly
unique in that, whatever he thought, he could express in perfectly-chosen
words fit to exact meter and rhyme.

[1]
[http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=works+of+lord+...](http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=works+of+lord+byron)

[2] [https://smile.amazon.com/Byron-Life-Legend-Fiona-
MacCarthy/d...](https://smile.amazon.com/Byron-Life-Legend-Fiona-
MacCarthy/dp/0374186294)

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btilly
Byron was a fascinating person. See
[https://publicdomainreview.org/2014/10/16/the-poet-the-
physi...](https://publicdomainreview.org/2014/10/16/the-poet-the-physician-
and-the-birth-of-the-modern-vampire/) for the story of how the modern vampire
was based on his personal physician's opinion of Byron.

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pmoriarty
Also see George Bernard Shaw's _Don Juan in Hell_ (a scene from _Man and
Superman_ often performed as a one-act play).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_and_Superman#Don_Juan_in_H...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_and_Superman#Don_Juan_in_Hell)

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Mediterraneo10
I recently read that there was a surge in Lord Byron’s popularity in the USA
in the 1920s and 1930s. I find that so hard to believe. It must have simply
vanished from American consciousness without a trace after the war (Stefan
Zweig’s novels are a similar case).

How many American schoolchildren in the last several decades read any Byron?
Even at the university level, I never read him directly, I only heard some
things about him that were mainly negative, like his sexism, or his role in
insisting that a newly independent Greece revive the Ancient Greek culture
that Western Europeans expected from it, when it fact Greece had been a deeply
Orthodox Christian society for 1500 years and all those pagan gods and
Athenian or Spartan values had long been forgotten.

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cafard
For what value of "last several"? Honestly, I'm not at this point sure whether
I read any Byron in high school English. I have the impression that he was
very popular in the US curriculum until the modernists devalued the romantics.

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ShabbosGoy
> I never loved nor pretended to love her—but a man is a man—& if a girl of
> eighteen comes prancing to you at all hours—there is but one way.

Truer words were never spoken.

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JohnJamesRambo
I never knew Byron was such a dick until reading this. I don't find it all
romantic or exciting at all, just a sad account of an untreated person with
bipolar disorder.

