Byron's Poetry and Prose (Norton Critical Edition)

I love Norton Critical Editions. This is exactly what I was looking for. It's great for reading his works. It's also great if you want to study his life, and it's perfect if you want to write an essay and need outside sources that are credible. Wonderful edition. I'm very happy with it. So happy, in fact, that I also bought the Norton Critical Edition of Percy Shelley's Poetry and Prose.

This is a wonderfully broad collection of Byron's best poetry and letters, as well as a generous sampling of the critical reception of his work by his peers and later generations.

As full and complete collection of Byron as can be found anywhere, all the poetry and the prose. Who can say more?

I enjoy Norton critical editions because they give so much attention to the critical tradition and to the textual scholarship. Great book!

This book has much, much more in it than I could have imagined and sinking my teeth into it is a "feel good" situation. I highly recommend this book.

Although Byron is considered to be one of the Romantic poets, his sensibility, his humor and his cynicism are profoundly modern in outlook. All of the other significant English poets of the era have an earnestness and seriousness of purpose that are traits Byron would be horrified to be "accused" of possessing. He is the template for a rebel without a specific cause: unless it is a genuine hatred for cant and prudery. His humor is sharp and shocking, much of it aimed at himself and his travails as a man gifted with the ability to attract controversy. His rumored relationship with his half-sister Augusta Leigh caused such revulsion that he was forced into exile from England, essentially making him a man without a country.As might be expected, this was grist for Byron's mill and his poetry, which in his early masterpiece Childe Harold's Pilgrimage is filled with an uncharacteristically serious bitterness against political malfeasance and social injustice. As his troubles mount, his sense of the absurd saves him and he becomes more reserved in his poetic persona but also mordantly satirical. Byron's hatred for social injustice is now, if anything, even stronger, but he has chosen new poetic weapons to combat it, using a richly ironic tone that recognizes the quixotic nature of such a struggle. Byron finds his mature poetic voice in the mock-heroic ottava rima (consisting of eight iambic lines per stanza rhyming a-b-a-b-a-b-c-c) of Don Juan, which is an indisputable comic masterpiece. Reading a few cantos of this lengthy epic can quickly draw you into Byron's world of human absurdity, pretentiousness and ribaldry, making it one of poetry's most satisfying comic utterances. There is nothing quite like it in English verse. Byron was an ardent admirer of the great satiric writers Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope and felt a kinship to their work which was closer than to any of his contemporaries except, perhaps, for Shelley, whom he viewed as a kindred revolutionary spirit.This Norton Critical Edition contains all of Byron's significant shorter poetry as well as a hefty selection from Don Juan. Because it is geared towards undergraduate students, the classic and modern critical examinations of Byron are extensive and far-reaching in their focus. The contextual information is impressive, the annotations are quite good and the headnotes provide a solid introduction to each of the poems. Very impressive is the way Byron's most important poems are sandwiched by contemporary correspondence that provides them with an historical context that is as good as any I've seen. This Norton Critical Edition is a superb introduction to the poet that Lady Caroline Lamb famously described as being "mad, bad and dangerous to know". Byron was a complex man who died in his mid-thirties, fighting in an appropriately quixotic struggle for the freedom of an almost mythic Greece, breathing his last in the rain and mud of Missolonghi, laying on the coast near the foothills of the western mountains. There was much depth to the man, neither mad nor bad but gifted with a genius for seeing the comedy and absurdity of human folly and blessed with the ability to express himself with uncommon wit.

The poetry of Lord Byron can be characterized as the cynicism of sanity. It is permeated with the Supreme syllable of the poem, his art it is a reflection of the time in which the poet lived. Lord Byron was alien to bourgeois rule. He, as a true rebel wanted to live freely and independently. In some degree, his lifestyle is the forerunner of modern life. And it is wonderful when in the history of mankind there are such geniuses, what was Lord Byron. Thank you very much!

I received the first edition of that volume instead of the second one, as it is shown and written on the product's page.The title of the book is quite a glorious " Poetry and Prose ", yet it is not a an edition of the complete works. ' Mazeppa ' and ' The Corsair ' are nowhere to be found, for example ( and they are no tiny poems ! ), and ' Don Juan ' is incomplete. I am only writing about the poetry section here... the commentary, the scolarship, blablabla, authoritative and all... blabla... but if you have that much space in the volume as to put in it various essays, why isn't the priority given to the main man's text, viz. LORD EFFIN BYRON ??? I just don't get it. Why can't the brits make a clear and concise complete works editions of their writers like the americans did with The Library of America, or the french with their Pléiade ? Jeeeeeeez

Thanks. i got this book within a 6 days.Love Amazon for the speedy delivery.The book has everyhing about Byron and critics views about His poerty.

A tous et toutes bossant des 'concours' très...sélectifs en anglais...voire certaines prépas...l'édition Norton avec Arden est dans le top 2 des éditions à potasser....LG 34

I LOVE BYRON'S POETRY.