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15 - Byron's European reception

from Part 3 - Literary Contexts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2006

Drummond Bone
Affiliation:
University of Liverpool
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Summary

It is not difficult to discover the huge impact which Byron, most Eurocentred of all the English 'Romantic' writers, had on Europe; but it may be difficult to credit it from the perspective of 2004, in which he is just one 'Romantic' name out of half-a-dozen. A document may help. Francesco Guerrazzi was a poet and historical novelist, who had met Byron at Pisa, and became famous later as a politician - he was made dictator of Tuscany on the flight of the Grand Duke in 1849. He records in his Memorie an apparition he experienced while studying law:

At that time the rumour spread in Pisa that an extraordinary man had arrived there, of whom people told a hundred different tales, all contradictory and many absurd. They said that he was of royal blood, of very great wealth, of sanguine temperament, of fierce habits, masterly in knightly exercises, possessing an evil genius, but a more than human intellect. He was said to wander through the world like Job’s Satan seeking a similar adventurer, or calumniator of God. It was George Byron . . . I had not seen Niagara Falls, nor the avalanches of the Alps, I did not know what a volcano was, but I had watched furious tempests, lightning had struck near me, and still nothing from amongst the sights which I had known produced anything like the bewilderment created in me by reading the works of this great soul.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2004

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