This volume offers a wide-ranging, comprehensive selection of Byron’s poetry and prose.
It includes eighteen of his lyrics; Cantos One, Three, and excerpts from Canto Four of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage; two verse romances, The Prisoner of Chillon and The Giaour, the latter newly receiving critical attention for its prophetically disjunctive structure; Manfred; The Vision of Judgment; and Don Juan, presented in long self-contained extracts—the First, Fifth, Ninth, and Sixteenth Cantos complete, with the close of the Second Canto. An unusually rich selection from Byron’s letters and journals accompanies the poems.The critical essays offer an integrated view of Byron’s achievement as well as analyses of its different facets. Published for the first time is Bergen Evans’s general essay "Lord Byron’s Pilgrimage"; other essays are by John D. Jump, Michael G. Cooke, Francis Berry, Robert F. Gleckner, James R. Thompson, Frank D. McConnell, Leslie A. Marchand, and E. D. Hirsch, Jr.
A special section, "Images of Byron," presents 26 views of Byron as artist and as the epitome of the Romantic hero, ranging from the perspectives of his contemporaries to those of such modern writers as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and Albert Camus.
A Chronology sets forth the main events of Byron’s life, and a Selected Bibliography lists sources for further study.
