Abstract
The satirical Dedication of Don Juan to Robert Southey was never published in Byron’s lifetime. T. S. Eliot thought it “one of the most exhilarating pieces of abuse in the language.”2 But since the poem was to appear anonymously, Byron agreed to withdraw the Dedication, writing to his publisher, John Murray, on May 6, 1819: “I won’t attack the dog [Southey] so fiercely without putting my name.”3 The above lines, ironically poised (“I make no flattering assertions”), constitute a self-consciously parodic affirmation of political consistency that is yet not without a sense of pride. Buff and blue, the colors of Washington’s army, were associated in England with the Whig Club and the cover of the Edinburgh Review, and they signal the poet’s claim to an unchanging political affiliation, contrasted with what he saw as the political treachery of Southey. The lines, written from Byron’s self-imposed exile in Venice, thus hint both at the internationalism of a revolutionary movement and the parochialism of a national politics.
Meantime, Sir Laureate, I proceed to dedicate
In honest, simple verse, this song to you;
And if in flattering strains I do not predicate,
’Tis that I still retain my “buff and blue.”
(Don Juan, Dedication, lines 129–32)1
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Notes
Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, ed. J. J. McGann, 7 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–93), vol. V. All references to Don Juan are to this edition, henceforth cited in text as DJ. Complete Poetical Works henceforth cited as CPW.
T. S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber, 1957), 206.
George Gordon, Lord Byron, Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 13 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973–94), 6: 123. Hereafter cited in text as BLJ.
Malcolm Kelsall, Byron’s Politics (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1987);and, more recently, “Byron’s Politics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Byron, ed. Drummond Bone (Cambridge: University Press, 2004), 44–55.
Leslie Mitchell, The Whig World, 1760–1837 (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2005), xi.
Walter Bagehot, “The First Edinburgh Reviewers,” National Review, October, 1855, 253–84 (262).
So, for example, on Byron’s situation in Mesolongi, F. Rosen, Bentham, Byron and Greece: Constitutionalism, Nationalism, and Early Liberal Political Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992): “Byron was vulnerable … He lacked ideological commitment in a setting that required it, if any progress (of whatever value) was to be made” (193).
Gérard de Nerval, Oeuvres, ed. H. Lemaitre (Paris: Garnier, 1966), 591. “L’ambition n’était …pas ne notre âge … Il ne nous restait pour asile que cette tour d’ivoire des poètes, où nous montions toujours plus haut pour nous isoler de la foule.”
Charles James Fox to T. Grenville, August, 1789, quoted in Leslie Mitchell, Charles James Fox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 110.
Jock Macleod, “Misreading Writing: Rousseau, Byron, and Childe Harold III,” Comparative Literature 43, no. 3 (Summer 1991): 260–79 (274).
Jerome McGann, Fiery Dust: Byron’s Poetic Development (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 92.
“Observations upon Observations,” Lord Byron: The Complete Miscellaneous Prose, ed. Andrew Nicholson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 176. Hereafter cited in text as CMP.
Benjamin Constant, Journaux intimes (Paris: Gallimard, 1952), 212. “There is certainly [in him, sc. Fouché] a kind of mobility of imagination, a susceptibility to vague and melancholy impressions, which does not belong to the majority of men and in which the majority of men can see only affectation.”
Count Peter Gamba, A Narrative of Lord Byron’s Last Journey to Greece (Paris: Galignani, 1825), 33.
Robert Gleckner, Byron and the Ruins of Paradise (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), 132. The expression is from The Bride of Abydos, Canto II, 338.
Roderick Beaton, “Romanticism in Greece,” in Romanticism in National Context, ed. Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 92–108 (94).
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Minta, S. (2011). Byron: Consistency, Change, and the Greek War. In: Green, M.J.A., Pal-Lapinski, P. (eds) Byron and the Politics of Freedom and Terror. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230306608_10
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