Byron Quotes - page 2
Byron idealised and expressed that bitter spirit of discontent which has at the present moment taken a more material and tangible form. He is the incarnation of November. From time immemorial it has been an Englishman's privilege to grumble, and Byron gave picturesque language to the universal feeling.
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Martin Buber suggested that evil prevailed because of the inability of man to imagine the real. Yet human beings do have that capacity. Lord Byron, a poet favored by Alfred Nobel, captured the stark essence of a post-nuclear world in his poem "Darkness":
I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless; and the icy Earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went - and came, and brought no day,...
All earth was but one thought - and that was Death...
Bernard Lown
Byron! how sweetly sad thy melody!
Attuning still the soul to tenderness,
As if soft Pity, with unusual stress,
Had touched her plaintive lute, and thou, being by,
Hadst caught the tones, nor suffered them to die.
O'ershading sorrow doth not make thee less
Delightful: thou thy griefs dost dress
With a bright halo, shining beamily,
As when a cloud a golden moon doth veil,
Its sides are tinged with a resplendent glow,
Through the dark robe oft amber rays prevail,
And like fair veins in sable marble flow;
Still warble, dying swan! still tell the tale,
The enchanting tale, the tale of pleasing woe.
John Keats
The pessimists are aristocrats like Byron; the men who curse God are aristocrats like Swinburne. But when those who starve and suffer speak for a moment, they do not profess merely an optimism, they profess a cheap optimism; they are too poor to afford a dear one. They cannot indulge in any detailed or merely logical defence of life; that would be to delay the enjoyment of it. These higher optimists, of whom Dickens was one, do not approve of the universe; they do not even admire the universe; they fall in love with it. They embrace life too close to criticize or even to see it. Existence to such men has the wild beauty of a woman, and those love her with most intensity who love her with least cause.
G. K. Chesterton
... the treatment he experienced in England previous to his last departure from it. But I think he does not sufficiently make allowance for the envy and jealousy which prompted people to seize on his separation from Lady Byron as a pretext for attacking him with a thousand slanders, to which her unbroken silence on the cause of their separation lent but too much colour. Byron attributes the insults he received to a false system of morality in England, which condemned him without proof, and intruded itself into a domestic disagreement in which not even friends are deemed authorized to interfere; instead of ascribing them to what is much more likely to be the true cause, an envenomed jealousy of his genius, and the success with which its fruits have been crowned. Other separations in high life have taken place, without either husband or wife being exposed to persecution;..
Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington
"Napoleon will at first, no dobt, drive the Duke of Wellington. That I shall be sorry for . But I want to see Lord Castlereagh's head carried on a pike beneath that window." This feeling, violent as it is, seems to have been pretty deliberately cherished by Lord Byron. It is expressed in his conversation a few days later.
Lord Byron
On our return homewards, Shelley urged Byron to complete something he had begun. Byron smiled and replied,
"John Murray, my patron and paymaster, says my plays won't act. I don't mind that, for I told him they were not written for the stage-but he adds, my poesy won't sell: that I do mind, for I have an ‘itching palm.' He urges me to resume my old ‘Corsair style, to please the ladies.' John Murray is right, if not righteous: all I have yet written has been for women-kind; you must wait until I am forty, their influence will then die a natural death, and I will show the men what I can do.”.
Lord Byron
One can put up with, indeed more than put up with, a certain amount of technical carelessness in Poetry, provided it be in other respects of a very high order, as not unoften, for instance, in Shakespeare and Byron. But similar blemishes in a picture would be all but fatal to it in the estimation of connoisseurs, since it would be the first thing that struck them in it.
Alfred Austin
... nothing has for a long time afforded us so much pleasure, as the rich promise of dramatic excellence unfolded in this production of our Noble Exile. Without question, no such tragedy as Marino Faliero has appeared in English, since the day when Otway also was inspired to his masterpiece by the interests of a Venetian story and a Venetian conspiracy.
The story of which Lord Byron has possessed himself is, we think, by far the finer of the two,-and we say possessed, because we believe he has adhered almost to the letter of the transactions as they really took place.
John Wilson (Scottish writer)
