For a full account of Byron’s arguments on this point as it relates to Don Juan, see T. Byron argues that in Don Juan‘the gravity … (in intention at least) heighten the fun’ I would argue that the ‘fun’ heightens the ‘gravity’ in The Island. See especially the letter to Murray (12 August 1819), Letters and Journals, IV 339–46, in which Byron answers the objection of a critic ‘to the quick succession of fun and gravity’ (341). For an account of Bolotoo, see Byron’s source: John Martin, Mariner’s Account of the Tonga Islands (London, 1817) II, Chap.

William Bligh, A Narrative of the Mutiny on Board His Majesty’s Ship Bounty… (London, 1790).īyron does not make the nature of Bolotoo explicit in his poem, but the reference makes clear that it is a place associated with the Gods.

Rutherford, Byron: A Critical Study(Stanford, 1962) 202. Rutherford (London, 1970) 413 and for ‘rag-bag of old Byronic themes’, Symonds, quoted in Byron: The Critical Heritage, ed. McGann, Fiery Dust: Byron’s Poetic Development(Chicago, 1968) 186–202.įor ‘a total failure’, see John A. Gleckner, Byron and’the Ruins of Paradise(Baltimore, 1967) 347–50 Īnd J. See also Frye, Fearful Symmetry(Princeton, 1947) 26. Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism(Princeton, 1957) 106, 162 and passim. 3Neither Wordsworth nor Shelley is naively unaware of the great gulf fixed between the world we want and the world we have, and in the poetry of both there is a strong sense of the strain of bringing the two worlds into any kind of alignment, but there is also, overall, an equally strong sense of the possibility of doing so. 2In the preface to Prometheus Unbound, Shelley describes the theme of his poem as ‘beautiful idealisms of moral excellence’. 260–1) which spreads a ‘sentiment of Being … O’er all that moves and all that seemeth still’ (401–2) and creates an image of life ‘All gratulant’ (XIV. Wordsworth celebrates in his poem the preservation of the ‘first/Poetic spirit of our human life’ (II. We are familiar with this impulse of romance in such major romantic works as The Prelude and Prometheus Unbound. One of the principal impulses of romance is the fulfilment of dream or the portrayal of the world we want to live in as opposed to the one we do live in, 1and one of the principal themes of Byron criticism is that the impulse did not work for Byron.

The Island by Lord Byron