The ‘Fever at the Core’: The Poetry of Passion

Abstract

There may be some truth in the contention that Byron, in poems such as The Giaour and The Corsair, was producing a kind of poetry that his audience wanted.¹ But much more than mere opportunism lies behind this long string of narrative poems, stretching from The Giaour through later efforts such as The Prisoner of Chillon and Parisina to Mazeppa and The Island (this last interrupted the composition of Don Juan). Clearly, Byron was fascinated by the possibilities of narrative verse, even if Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Don Juan both, in their very different ways, seem to announce his apparent indifference to anything we might understand by the term: he returns to the narrative form repeatedly, experimenting with perspectives, narrators, settings, in his attempts to elevate the verse tale, as popularised by Scott, into something more sublime. Whatever the formal peculiarities, though, I would want to argue that these reflect Byron’s thematic obsessions, obsessions that he addresses in different ways in his major satires and which are there throughout his writing life. In spite of his own teasingly nonchalant remarks, there is every reason for taking these poems seriously.