Customer Reviews

Lord Byron: The Major Works (Oxford World's Classics)

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All passion, intensity and fire, Byron cuts a swathe through the Regency era's lights, literature and ladies. He does so in a style that is the most beautiful and high prose you will ever read; magnificent curving arcs of words that could have come straight from the proud mouth of an archangel (or Lucifer himself). Of course, he occasionally descends into petty back-stabbing, misogyny and generally seems to be a bit of a spoilt child with too much time on his hands, but you can forgive him that just for Childe Harold's Pilgrimage alone.

This book claims to contain most of Lord Byron's major works and it certainly is a full volume, weighing in at over 1000 pages in paperback format. The larger works include the above-mentioned Pilgrimage and Don Juan. These take up at least 700 pages themselves. The remaining space is occupied by Manfred - a rather Nietzschean work about a magician; the Giaour - a tale of unrepentant love and loss; Mazeppa - a story of a man whose fortunes fall and rise dramatically; Beppo - a Venetian affaire de cour; Cain - an intense retelling of the biblical tale with Manichean overtones, and assorted shorter poems. There are also fifty pages of assorted correspondence with various individuals. The book comes equipped with a very short introduction (for a book of 1000 pages), a chronology of Byron's life, an index and end notes. There is very little in the way of explanation of why pieces are included and the end notes are mostly helpful but often explain the obvious while leaving the obscure, obscure. If you like books that contain no analysis, this is for you, but if you want things explained you will do better with something else.

Personally, I preferred the intensity and vision of Childe Harold, Cain and the Giaour to the more sarcastic and occasionally contrived style of Don Juan. Byron is at his best describing beauty - be it nature, art or woman. And much, if not all, of what he writes about is related to the fairer sex. You should write what you know about, they say, and Byron certainly knew women - in both the intellectual and biblical sense. His love affairs raged across all of Europe and brought him condemnation from his peers - particularly his dalliance with his half-sister. His books are full of the worship of the beauty of women and he objectifies them in a way that is entirely politically incorrect in our day and age and likely was then as well. If you can get past the fact that he seems like a teenage boy in rut most of the time, his descriptive powers, characterization, wit, sheer beauty and nobility of expression are sure to please.

The text is nice enough but I guess you get what you pay for and there is no way the books ultra cheep constructions gets you through its 1120 pages... just like the other two Oxford World Press books I ordered with this one. Really, $0.08 more a book to put a sturdy cover on it please?!?!?

Lord Byron was perhaps the most dazzling and influential figure of the Romantic movement. He was certainly the most colorful, controversial, and celebrated poet of his time. His poetic style is controlled, yet the sentiments expressed are passionate. He can be sad and despairing in one stanza, then ecstatically happy in the next, and it is these impulsive mood swings which made him no less contradictory in his beliefs and actions. He wrote some wonderful lyrical poems, but my favorite are his long poems, like "Don Juan." He is and was a captivating personality and a brilliant poet.

David Rehak
author of "Poems From My Bleeding Heart"

I generally prefer the Oxford World's Classics series to Penguin's editions of the same works and authors. Why? Because Oxford boasts better (thicker) paper, better fonts, better printing, better covers, usually better notes and better introductions... Oxford just seems to present an overall better product at roughly equivalent prices. But Oxford made a crucial mistake in their edition of Lord Byron: The Major Works--they didn't give Don Juan a separate volume. The effect of stuffing Don Juan into this volume means that the book is conflated to an unwieldy 1100+ pages, and several of Byron's key poems are either omitted or severely abridged (like Lara and The Corsair). Here, they really should've followed Penguin's lead in creating separate volumes for Don Juan and another for Byron's other poetry. But it's even worse when one considers that the Oxford contains a sampling of Byron's prose. So after you subtract the pages for Don Juan and the prose, you're left with only about 470 pages of Byron's other poetry in compared to Penguin's 780.

Now, granted, perhaps what's available here in the Oxford Edition will be enough for many readers, and it does still provide its usual advantages in paper, printing, font, notes, and intros. Byron was incredibly prolific, but like most prolific poets he tended to produce more bad poetry than good/great poetry. It's just a numbers thing; writing great poetry takes time and attention to small details. It's why it took Milton years to write Paradise Lost at a rate of 40-or-so lines a day. Every detail had to be worked out. At Byron's best he was as good as anybody, and his skill combined with his unique philosophical worldview makes him endlessly provocative, compelling, and readable, even at his worst. Byron didn't believe in Pope's maxim about how the real art of poetry was in rewriting and perfecting what one had written. He rarely tried to better his drafts, preferring to move on to the next project. I think this approach works best in his longer works where minor imperfections in the verse--be they occasionally bland, prose-like formulations, awkward meter, et al.--were less noticeable when set against the macro vision of the narrative and characters.

But, in light of realizing that Byron was at his best in the longer pieces, it's precisely those that are hurt most in The Oxford Edition. Lara and The Corsair are essential Byron, even if they're not as great as Don Juan or Child Harold's Pilgrimage, and they're almost non-existent here. And lesser (but still quality) works like The Siege of Corinth and The Prisoner of Chillon are gone entirely. So, I'll leave it up to each individual customer to decide if the Oxford's usual strengths compensate for the loss of these works. Another option is the Norton Critical Edition, which is more valuable for its critical apparatus than for the poetry itself.

Byron was the god of his age. He was worshipped throughout Europe .Today that glory has largely faded and his place in the pantheon of literary greats is somewhat diminished. With Byron there too is the question of the sensational personal life and the heroic role he adopted for himself as revolutionary liberator in Greece's war of independence. As for the poetry I doubt that too many read ' Childe Harold ' with the kind of hunger and enthusiasm it was read in Byron's time. But Byron is an incredible lyricist and there is great poetry in his canon. ' He is a figure of great passion and power, the arch- romantic hero including the demonish mysterious side. For me the total works of Byron are not to be chewed and digested but to be skimmed and tasted. There is much beauty in them.
'She walks in beauty like the night / of cloudless climes and starry skies/ And all that's best of dark and bright / Meet in her aspect and her eyes: / Thu mellowed to that tender light/ Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

The book got here in a speedy manner and made my husband's birthday complete! Thank you! A very happy customer!

I purchased this book with several others as a wedding gift. This book is almost a pound of Lord Byron's work; it was great to find such a complete volume.

This book is the definative collection of Byron works. It is simply amazing, and is composed beautifully. I would recomend it to anyone looking to learn about the amazing life and work of George Gordon, Lord Byron

Byron claimed to be outside of metaphysical thinking, which Chesterton said is hypocritical; Byron could not exist without the philosophical generational zeitgeist of Kant, Swedenborg, Lamark and Rousseau and the energy they created towards looking at first causes/orgins; time induced thinking which created the sociological inspired individual responsibility of man towards society and his self-induced muckiness of Malthusian conjectures and the societal induced causes of injustice of Mill towards the individual, and the conjectural futurism of Marx and Hegel, which inspired Darwin, the big bang theory, Hegel's historical religiosity, religious anthropology (then Joseph Campbell), Hitler's paganism, Zionism, other indigenous rights movements, anthropology in general, and psychology. Man's profound and deep rooted sense of his being in the field of time. Byron's "Cain" seems somewhat inspired by the discovery of fossils and dinosaur evidence by Baron Cuvier. Byron's energetic placement of himself in the tide of history, destiny, and time was a mark of his times and his interpretation may have influenced Wagner and definitely influenced Neitzsche. He was a product of his age and energy. The same energy America was born under, at least in this geist's earliest stage. Byron was a product of the metaphysics of his day and the generation previous, consciously of Rousseau and unconsciously of the others. Byron rode this wild beast of freedom and liberty of his time and verbally puked over the common sense and good decorum of British good nature and decency. He was a poetic rebel. Poetry would never quite recover and have the good name (according to Wilfrid Sheed in his forward "Leave it to Psmith") in the English-speaking world but young poetic followers of Byron would be trampled on by teachers, fellow students, and professors ever after. Even today poets are seen as a sort of pest in the eyes of common English-speakers. Byron was extremely popular on the European continent where poetry still has a good name. No other poet has been more talked about since Byron and Byron's criticism of other poets of his day plus his questioning of the honor of Britain surely played a part in that. Byron's energy and ideas left England shocked and she never quite recovered.

Goethe said no poet of Byron's stature would come again and he was a formative poet, one where the reader is transformed, and that makes him great; but Goethe also pointed at a child, an immature, aspect of Byron as well.

Byron lived a full life, he was a rebel, and a genius. Loving life and living were what he was about and his poetry places himself his actions in some encompassing history of destiny and fate. He had a passion for liberty and humanism yet he maintained an aura of sorrow. His descriptions of himself might well reflect his own on Rousseau (p.127-), except he stood on the opposite side the history of revolution and Napoleon; perhaps he was that of a more matured Rousseau but still immature none-the-less. He often took a stoic sad appreciation of storms, rough waves, avalanches. G K Chesterton pointed to Byron having sad words but his prosody is that of and optimist, he exudes optimism faces his storms with inspiring optimism. Byron was complex and possibly the most influential poet of all time.


His success and the challenges it posed to the social mores and what was considered respectable thinking were difficult for Byron's native land to swallow. According to Wilfred Sheed, in his introduction to "Leave it To Psmith" by Wodehouse, focused academics and Head Masters and such to derisively quell any Byron-like poet upstarts and left the English-speaking world with something shallow, or at the best more subtle. But as France went on to produce Rimbauds and Flauberts the English-speaking world produced entertainment that mocks their sort, and their artsy kind; English entertainment like Gilbert and Sullivan and Wodehouse -- Byron mocked England in his own day the English choose an art that mocked him. Byron did not glorify the great battles of his nation in his day, like Waterloo, but merely equated England as a sort of cog in history; slowing things down but really not affecting anything for the better. Plus he gave more credit to Russia for Napoleon's defeat then the British might want to have admitted.