Abstract
In this chapter, we return to the very spot on the Greek landscape where we began in Chap. 2: Acrocor inth. I argue that we can read Byron’s The Siege of Corinth as a poem of resistance to the trope of oneness . Byron, unconcerned with the crisis of subjectivity that plagued so many other poets and thinkers of the era, takes up the trope of melding into one—with nature and with a female object of desire—only to set it down again. He thus rejects vibrant materiality in favour of earthly corporeality. In the poem’s concluding scene, an enormous explosion of gunpowder atop Acrocorinth, which sends body parts flying into the air in bloody confusion, Byron appears, with some irony, to literalize the metaphor of “one with all.”
“If I am a poet … the air of Greece made me one.”
—Byron to Edward Trelawny
Edward John Trelawny, Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author (New York: Scribner and Welford, 1887), 32.
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Notes
- 1.
For the translation of Hyperion, see Friedrich Hölderlin, Hyperion Or the Hermit in Greece, trans. Ross Benjamin (Brooklyn: Archipelago Books, 2008), 8–10. For the original German, see Friedrich Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Friedrich Beissner and Adolf Beck, Grosse Stuttgarter Ausgabe, 8 vols. (in 15), (Stuttgart: Cotta; W. Kohlhammer, 1943–1985), 3:7–9.
- 2.
Byron, 3: 483. All citations from Byron’s works refer to Lord Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981). “The Morea,” in Byron’s day was a common term for the Peloponnese. The “Gulf of Athens” refers to the Saronic Gulf. “Lepanto” is today known as Nafpaktos.
- 3.
Qtd. in Roderick Beaton, Byron’s War: Romantic Rebellion, Greek Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013), 5–6.
- 4.
Hölderlin, Hyperion, 12. Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, 3:8.
- 5.
Paul Muldoon, for example, recently suggested, “But in a strange way Byron is not really a romantic at all. He’s finally an anti-romantic poet … I mean he tends toward the cynical rather than the celebratory, to the epigram rather than the epiphany.” Paul Muldoon and Jason Shinder, “A Conversation on Byron with Jason Shinder,” The American Poetry Review 36, no. 6 (2007), 63. On Byron’s opposition to Romantic aesthetics generally, see George Cheatham, “Byron’s Dislike of Keats’s Poetry.” Keats-Shelley Journal 32 (1983), 24.
- 6.
Since 1832 it has been the custom to publish The Siege of Corinth prefaced with a fragment of 45 autobiographical lines of verse that (according to McGann) Byron originally intended for The Bride of Abydos (1813). Since these lines never made it into that poem, however, and because they conclude with a reference to Acrocorinth (“Acro-Corinth’s brow”), editors have seen fit to append them to the beginning of Siege. For these fragmentary “Lines Associated with The Siege of Corinth,” see Byron, Complete Poetical Works, 3:356. For history and commentary, see McGann’s notes in Byron, Complete Poetical Works, 3:488.
- 7.
Byron, Complete Poetical Works, 3:356.
- 8.
“I lay on my ship and gazed at the trees and mosques (Moskeen) of this city [Smyrna].” Hölderlin, Hyperion, 51. Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, 3:38.
- 9.
Yannis Hamilakis, “Decolonizing Greek Archaeology: Indigenous Archaeologies, Modernist Archaeology and the Post-Colonial Critique,” in A Singular Antiquity, ed. D. Damaskos, and D. Plantzos, 1–15 (Athens: The Benaki Museum, 2008), 2. Hamilakis is specifically referencing the Athenian Acropolis, a messy “palimpsest,” that included, at the time Byron was there in 1810–1811, a mosque within the ruins of the Parthenon. This “barbaric” Ottoman structure that tainted the classical Parthenon was one of those razed by German architects later in the nineteenth century in the name of classical purity.
- 10.
Critics of Byron’s poem at times conflate the ancient city of Corinth and the fortress of Acrocorinth that sits on a “hoary rock” (line 6) high above the city itself. Some critical notes and readings suggest, incorrectly, that the city itself is under siege. See, for example, McGann, The Complete Poetical Works, 3:482, and Susan J. Wolfson, “Byron’s Ghosting Authority,” ELH: Journal of English Literary History 76, no. 3 (2009), 775. The conflation of city and fortress is perhaps precipitated by Byron’s title (which technically might be more accurately The Siege of Acrocorinth), as well as by other textual references within the poem to Corinth rather than to Acrocorinth for purposes of style and scansion. The opening lines, however, make it clear that Byron is well aware that it was the fortress of Acrocorinth (“yon tower-capt Acropolis”—line 24) that the Ottomans besieged, and not the city of Corinth below it. By the time of the battle, the Ottomans already controlled the isthmus and the city, whose inhabitants had fled to the safety of the fortress (which has its own spring). See George Finlay, The History of Greece under Othoman and Venetian Domination (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood, 1856), 266–269.
- 11.
Byron, Complete Poetical Works, 3:323.
- 12.
Hölderlin, Hyperion, 10. Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, 3:7.
- 13.
Hölderlin, Hyperion, 92. Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, 3:68.
- 14.
Byron, Complete Poetical Works, 3:329.
- 15.
For more on this passage and Byron’s image of stars as “isles of light,” see Eugen Köbling, Lord Byrons Werke in Kritischen Texten Mit Einleitungen und Anmerkungen. Vol. I: The Siege of Corinth (Weimar: Verlag von Emil Felber, 1896), 70–72. Köbling concerns himself only with possible passages that may have influenced Byron’s choice of the starry image, not with comparable uses of similar images (such as Hölderlin’s) in Romantic literature more generally.
- 16.
Trelawny, Records, 32.
- 17.
Byron, Complete Poetical Works, 3:340.
- 18.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat. 2. ed. (New York: Norton, 2002), 406.
- 19.
Byron, Complete Poetical Works, 3:342.
- 20.
Byron, Complete Poetical Works, 3:339.
- 21.
Byron, Complete Poetical Works, 3:343.
- 22.
Byron, Complete Poetical Works, 3:333.
- 23.
Hölderlin, Hyperion, 151. Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, 3:112.
- 24.
Hölderlin, Hyperion, 153. Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, 3:114.
- 25.
Byron, Complete Poetical Works, 3:334.
- 26.
Byron, Complete Poetical Works, 3:354.
- 27.
Byron, Complete Poetical Works, 3:354.
- 28.
To rephrase Coleridge’s “This Lime Tree Bower My Prison” (1797): “On the wide landscape, gaze till all doth seem/Less gross than bodily” (lines 40–41)—another poem that contains the very sort of Romantic figures Byron here resists. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Coleridge’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Nicholas Halmi, Paul Magnuson, and Raimonda Modiano (W. W. Norton & Company, 2004), 138.
- 29.
The quotation from Schelling is from System of Transcendental Idealism. Friedrich Schelling, Schellings Werke nach der Originalausgabe in neuer Ordnung, 12 vols., ed. Manfred Schröter (Munich: E.H. Beck and R. Oldenburg, 1927), 3:349. For the lines from Epipsychidion, see Shelley, Poetry and Prose, 407 (lines 578–579).
- 30.
Letter to George and Georgiana Keats, 18 September 1819. John Keats, Letters of John Keats to His Family and Friends, ed. Sidney Colvin (London: Macmillan, 1925), 302.
- 31.
Trelawny, Records, 220. On this incident, see also Beaton, Byron’s War, 163.
- 32.
For another account of this time on Ithaca, including the visit to Homer’s School, see Stephen Minta, On a Voiceless Shore: Byron in Greece (New York: Holt, 1998), 227–229.
- 33.
Trelawny, Records, 31.
- 34.
Trelawny, Records, 32.
- 35.
Hölderlin, Hyperion, 69. Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, 3:51.
Bibliography
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Finlay, George. The History of Greece Under Othoman and Venetian Domination. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood, 1856.
Hamilakis, Yannis. “Decolonizing Greek Archaeology: Indigenous Archaeologies, Modernist Archaeology and the Post-Colonial Critique.” In A Singular Antiquity, Edited by D. Damaskos and D. Plantzos, 1–15. Athens: The Benaki Museum, 2008.
Hölderlin, Friedrich. Sämtliche Werke. In Große Stuttgarter Ausgabe, Edited by Friedrich Beissner and Adolf Beck. 8 vols. (in 15). Stuttgart: Kohlhammer Verlag, 1985.
———. Hyperion Or the the Hermit in Greece. Translated by Ross Benjamin. Brooklyn: Archipelago Books, 2008.
Keats, John. Letters of John Keats to His Family and Friends. Edited by Sidney Colvin. London: Macmillan, 1925.
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Trelawny, Edward John. Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author. Vol. 1. 2nd ed. New York: Scribner and Welford, 1887.
Wolfson, Susan J. “Byron’s Ghosting Authority.” ELH: Journal of English Literary History 76, no. 3 (2009): 763–792.
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Davis, W.S. (2018). Coda: With Byron on Acrocorinth. In: Romanticism, Hellenism, and the Philosophy of Nature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91292-9_5
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