Volume 56, Number 14 · September 24, 2009
Pilgrim to Eros
By Harold Bloom
Byron in Love: A Short Daring Life
by Edna O'Brien
Norton, 228 pp., $24.95
The ultimate contrast in English poetry is between Byron and Shakespeare. Of Byron the passional man, we know nearly everything, while of Shakespeare's inwardness we know nothing. Shelley, a superb literary critic, considered Byron's Don Juan to be the great poem of the age, surpassing even Goethe and Wordsworth. Once I would not have agreed with Shelley, but moving toward the age of seventy-nine and having just reread Don Juan, I am persuaded. Unfinished and unfinishable, Byron's masterwork ought to be his monument. It is almost as large-minded and various as its outrageous creator, but will continue to be overshadowed by his legend. Byron is the eternal archetype of the celebrity, the Napoleon of the realms of rhyme. Only Shakespeare, who recreated Plutarch's Cleopatra as the matchless celebrity of the ancient world, would be capable of representing Lord Byron in a tragicomedy worthy of the still unique celebrity of the modern world, dwarfing all latecomer rock superstars.
Review, 3752 words
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