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Byronic hero
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Byronic hero
The Byronic hero is a variant of the Romantic hero as a type of character, named after the English Romantic poet Lord Byron. Historian and critic Lord Macaulay described the character as "a man proud, moody, cynical, with defiance on his brow, and misery in his heart, a scorner of his kind, implacable in revenge, yet capable of deep and strong affection".
Both Byron's own persona as well as characters from his writings are considered to provide defining features to the character type.
The Byronic hero first reached a very wide public in Byron's semi-autobiographical epic narrative poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812–1818). Despite Byron's clarifying Childe was a fictitious character in the preface of the work, "the public immediately associated Byron with his gloomy hero", with readers "convinced ... that Byron and Childe were one and the same".
Byron's poems with Oriental settings show more "swashbuckling" and decisive versions of the type. Later works show Byron progressively distancing himself from the figure by providing alternative hero types, like Sardanapalus (Sardanapalus), Juan (Don Juan) or Torquil ("The Island"), or, when the figure is present, by presenting him as less sympathetic (Alp in "The Siege of Corinth") or criticising him through the narrator or other characters. Byron would later attempt such a turn in his own life when he joined the Greek War of Independence, with fatal results, though recent studies show him acting with greater political acumen and less idealism than previously thought. The actual circumstances of his death from disease in Greece were unglamorous in the extreme, but back in England these details were ignored in the many works promoting his myth.
The initial version of the type in Byron's work, Childe Harold, draws on a variety of earlier literary characters including Hamlet, Goethe's Werther (1774), and William Godwin's Mr. Faulkland in Caleb Williams (1794); he was also noticeably similar to René, the hero of Chateaubriand's novella of 1802, although Byron may not have read this. Ann Radcliffe's "unrepentant" Gothic villains (beginning in 1789 with the publication of The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, a Highland Story) also foreshadow a moody, egotistical Byronic "villain" nascent in Byron's own juvenilia, some of which looks back to Byron's Gordon relations, aristocrats of the Scottish Highlands or Jacobites now lost between two worlds. For example, in Byron's early poem "When I Roved a Young Highlander" (1808), we see a reflection of Byron's youthful Scottish connection, but also find these lines:
As the last of my race, I must wither alone,
And delight but in days, I have witness'd before:
These lines echo William Wordsworth's treatment of James Macpherson's Ossian in "Glen-Almain" (1807):
That Ossian, last of all his race!
Lies buried in this lonely place.
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Byronic hero
The Byronic hero is a variant of the Romantic hero as a type of character, named after the English Romantic poet Lord Byron. Historian and critic Lord Macaulay described the character as "a man proud, moody, cynical, with defiance on his brow, and misery in his heart, a scorner of his kind, implacable in revenge, yet capable of deep and strong affection".
Both Byron's own persona as well as characters from his writings are considered to provide defining features to the character type.
The Byronic hero first reached a very wide public in Byron's semi-autobiographical epic narrative poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812–1818). Despite Byron's clarifying Childe was a fictitious character in the preface of the work, "the public immediately associated Byron with his gloomy hero", with readers "convinced ... that Byron and Childe were one and the same".
Byron's poems with Oriental settings show more "swashbuckling" and decisive versions of the type. Later works show Byron progressively distancing himself from the figure by providing alternative hero types, like Sardanapalus (Sardanapalus), Juan (Don Juan) or Torquil ("The Island"), or, when the figure is present, by presenting him as less sympathetic (Alp in "The Siege of Corinth") or criticising him through the narrator or other characters. Byron would later attempt such a turn in his own life when he joined the Greek War of Independence, with fatal results, though recent studies show him acting with greater political acumen and less idealism than previously thought. The actual circumstances of his death from disease in Greece were unglamorous in the extreme, but back in England these details were ignored in the many works promoting his myth.
The initial version of the type in Byron's work, Childe Harold, draws on a variety of earlier literary characters including Hamlet, Goethe's Werther (1774), and William Godwin's Mr. Faulkland in Caleb Williams (1794); he was also noticeably similar to René, the hero of Chateaubriand's novella of 1802, although Byron may not have read this. Ann Radcliffe's "unrepentant" Gothic villains (beginning in 1789 with the publication of The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, a Highland Story) also foreshadow a moody, egotistical Byronic "villain" nascent in Byron's own juvenilia, some of which looks back to Byron's Gordon relations, aristocrats of the Scottish Highlands or Jacobites now lost between two worlds. For example, in Byron's early poem "When I Roved a Young Highlander" (1808), we see a reflection of Byron's youthful Scottish connection, but also find these lines:
As the last of my race, I must wither alone,
And delight but in days, I have witness'd before:
These lines echo William Wordsworth's treatment of James Macpherson's Ossian in "Glen-Almain" (1807):
That Ossian, last of all his race!
Lies buried in this lonely place.
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