Abstract
byron: If you would be a poet of Byronic stature, then let your greatest inspirations be opium, claret, wriggling navels and the honourable member for Cockshire.… By the time I was eighteen, I’d tupped more women than I can count; broke their hearts, minds and kidneys without regret or remorse. I’ve caught the pox twice, attended several black masses; murdered men both in anger and cold blood, got my sister with child‖’ (mary: AND my sister!’) ‘Yet, for the poet, none of these things are crimes. For the poet the only crime is to live without genius, without fame, without ambition; and to have lived your life within the strict ceremonies of…’ (keats: ‘Horse-turds! It’s easy to pose as a sinner when in possession of personal fortune…’.) (Dread Poet’s Society, dir. Andy Wilson, 1992).
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Notes
See Andrew Nicholson, Lord Byron The Complete Miscellaneous Prose (Oxford 1991) p. 329.
For Southey’s nightmares — much more sensational than anything he put into his poems — see Dowden, The Correspondence of Robert Southey with Caroline Bowles (Longman 1881) Appendix I.
For Byron’s two trips into the Chillon dungeon, see Cochran, Manuscripts of the Younger Romantics, Byron XIII (Garland 1995) pp. 3–4.
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Cochran, P. (1999). The Life of Bryon, or Southey was Right. In: Wilson, F. (eds) Byromania. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27107-8_4
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