Johnson governed in the exact opposite way he campaigned, particularly during COVID. But the comparison to Byron is nonsensical. A better Byron would be, say, Charlie Sheen, or Hunter Biden, if Biden fils had any discernable talents.
But neither of those three men had Byron’s artistic gifts, nor the sincerity of his political beliefs, nor his aesthetic sense. Byron, depraved as he often was, believed in his political causes.
Johnson really just approached his causes as a careerist would, albeit with a bustling incompetence.
Eagleton belongs to that relatively small club of exclusively left-wing academic aristocrats. Not actual aristocrats of course, just the gatekeepers to their profession.
No, he emphatically does not like Boris Johnson, though at this stage whether that’s because Boris is ostensibly a right-winger, or because Boris proved to the world that left-wing politics will f**k up a country just as effectively when implemented by a right-winger – that’s something only Terry could answer, and wouldn’t answer it honestly anyway.
Eagleton is very clever though: I read Literary Theory, a book he wrote well over 30 years ago, and I read it just after I’d read the David Lodge novels about Rummidge University (clearly intended by Lodge to be 1970s Birmingham but renamed either through poetic licence, or possibly out of a desire not to be sued by the same people who thought a Telly Savalas voiceovered film would attract tourists to the city). The novels were about the tension arising at the time between classical, comparative literary criticism and the post-modern structuralist approach, against a backdrop of the hilarious contrast of academia’s experience of Britain’s 1970s declinism with America’s simultaneous extravagance.
In the Lodge novels this was mainly light-hearted and comedic, but once I read Eagleton’s book, it became apparent how fundamental these areas are to the ambition of academia to remain politically relevant and wield political influence. Eagleton’s relating of the history of postmodernism in a literary academic context is actually rather fascinating.
Can you be rebauched after being debauched- like Don Juan giving all his wealth to the church and going celibate – though I reckon he did that just because he got old ..
Looking online for the etymology doesn’t take you very far . From Middle French desbaucher meaning to entice from work or duty but no one seems to know where that comes from .
I’m not an etymologist, but I suspect the meaning of the Old French baucher might mean hewing a beam from a piece of wood so that it becomes relatively ‘straight’ and, therefore, serviceable as a beam. So, assuming that achieving ‘straightness’ of beam is an essential quality of ‘baucher’, then ‘debaucher’ would mean to cause something to go ‘off-course’ or deviate from the norm. Hence the word ‘debauch’. I have heard a very old French folksong which talks about sailors being ‘débauchiers des filles’, so it’s been around for ages.
I bet the people who want us to eat bugs and ride bicycles instead of driving cars know the answer.
David McKee
18 days ago
Excellent! This would have been a good lecture for undergrads at Oxford.
Byron was talented, but his sybaritic tastes can close to ruining him. In modern-day terms, there is a thin dividing line between David Bowie and Amy Winehouse.
Like James Kirkpatrick and David Ochterlony, Byron found a freedom and a spiritual home in foreign climes that he never felt in Britain. Byron did not need to go as far as India, he found what he needed in the Mediterranean. It’s ironic that Byron’s political legacy – Greece – still endures long after the British Raj vanished. Who could have foretold that in the 1820s?
Well, of course. The British East India Company was enormous, and in many cases ran the colonial offices. And, corrupt as it sometimes was, not always for the worse.
Byron, sincere as he was about Greece and Italy, was pretty much a tourist.
You prefer the French attitude to their version of Gary Glitter L’orientaliste sportif Michel Foucault ?
Though of course the great philosopher had his Thais in Morocco .
I don’t believe the French today are any less petrified by the signifier “underage” than the British, n’est-ce pas? BTW, Mr Glitter’s consorts were in Cambodia, not Thailand, should that difference matter to you perchance…
Christopher Chantrill
18 days ago
No mention of Mary Shelley and Frankenstein. I wonder what the writer means by that.
Percy Bysse Shelley completely ignored, as well. Much like the pre-Raphaelites, a far bigger talent.
Matthew Jones
18 days ago
When I was young I cared more about an artist’s works than the person that they are or were. I’m now of the opposite opinion. I couldn’t care less how excellent his poetry was, the man was grotesque.
Arguably so. But it is pertinent to his love of Greece, sounds good to my ear, of interest to some versifiers like myself, and not bad for a 23-year-old.
“A mediocrity” is a pretty absurd dismissal of Byron. But an understandable if harsh take on the 4 stanzas I pasted: they’re more stilted and archaic than his norm, partly because they address a personified Mt. Parnassus, I think.
Byron is not near the top of my list but I think he’s underrated. Which 19th-century poets do you like?
Good group. Suspected you’d say Tennyson–I find him occasionally stirring, often dull and flat. Kipling and Poe seem minor (not trivial or mediocre) as poets. Full agreement on Keats, whose inclusion on your list surprises me a bit, in a good way. Unsolicited, I’ll nominate Wordsworth, Whitman, and Dickinson.
Donne Yay ! I think late 16th century to 1650 is hotspot . Recently been chanting out loud Marlowe Hero and Leander , Robert Herrick’s gorgeous poems , Henry King’s Exequy to His Matchless , Never to Be Forgotten Friend ( both funny and touching ) , Jonson , Marvell and early Milton ( so far never got through Paradise Lost )
Even Henry Vaughan’s religious poems are amazing as works of art ( try to ignore the piety )
I pretty much ignore 18th century , then Keats , Browning , Swinburne , Hardy , Housman , Arthur Symonds , Kipling too
I’m in partial agreement–character and behavior matter and at the extremes become a legitimate part of the legacy–though having read some of his better work before I knew how grotesque Byron could be means he is sort of (great-great-great) “grandfathered in” for me.
When you say you’ve adopted the “opposite opinion” I don’t guess you now rank artist’s solely by their qualities as a person, as in: “her voice is tuneless and shrill but she was such a good mother and citizen, so I’m a big fan” or “this book is a masterwork and I wish I could praise it–but he was a deadbeat dad and voted for the wrong candidates.”
Well no, as my original opinion wasn’t informed exclusively by artistic quality, the opposite view wouldn’t be based exclusively on the personal integrity of the artistic. I just value artistic brilliance less than I used to because I think that writing a great poem is less important than being a good human being.
One’s judgement of a “good human being” is very much subjective.
But most people possess common decency, hence the term.
Few of us write or create something like Byron – or Hemingway, or Wilde, or Picasso, or Stravinski. Cheever. Bukowski, of course. Edward Westin, John Lennon, David Bowie.
Would anyone say they all treated women well, were loving and dependable fathers, and were upstanding citizens?
No. But they created works of great beauty and meaning.
Good men are fairly commonplace, and thank heavens for that. Great men are rarely good, but are very uncommon, and we benefit from their greatness, if not their rectitude.
Wilde, I’ll give you, but pick some better examples. Does anyone read Hemingway anymore? I was bored to tears by him in HS. And Picasso is dreck. I you gave me a Picasso and I couldn’t sell it, and my choices were to hang it in my living room or burn it, I’d make a nice fire.
Modern art was about the only thing the Nazis were right about. The world would be a much more beautiful place if 95% of it didn’t exist.
And, to hear them tell it, 95% of the people–whom they get to choose and eliminate. I guess your negationist cultural tendencies overlap with the Bolsheviks here too.
Plenty of people still read Hemingway, far fewer Byron. You seem to think that anyone you don’t read or like has been proven worthless or mediocre.
Very well stated; better than I did in trying to make a similar point below, before noticing your reply. That’s a challenging list of “complicated”, uncommon artists.
For example: The moral shortcomings or personality flaws of two of the specific artists present a major life vs. work challenge to the present-day reader, for me anyway: Hemingway was a womanizing drunk with an oversized machismo who killed himself–but not reducible to that; Wilde groomed teenage boys for his dalliances (paying dearly for it in the end) and was ludicrously amoral and effete–but not only, as evidenced by The Ballad of Reading Gaol. I don’t dismiss the character and behavior of these enduring authors, but it doesn’t seem to erase their literary accomplishments. Nor do I regard them as pure villains in the human sense. And who I am to judge once I (try to) put aside my opinions, assumptions, and unearned gavel?
I meant “uncommon” in the sense of being influential and widely read and admired 60 and 120 years after their respective deaths. With no imminent danger of falling out of print.
I agree with your “child rapist on the wall” point below, and would estimate that I’m not far off from your overall point of view, though we emphasize different sides of the equation, and have different lists of who was just too far beyond certain limits. I wouldn’t have a statue of Byron on my desk, but I will read some of his work. I can understand why some would say: “Forget it, he wasn’t that good”.
Goodness is nuanced and often context dependent, but it’s not as subjective as you are implying. We all have a solid biblical framework to draw on which can be referred to any time, and a legal framework built on top of that.
As for Byron, shagging little boys and close relations is not good. There is no subjectivity to worry about regarding it.
As for the thesis “great people are always bad people” or “to create great things one must behave awfully” – one could easily make a list of prominent people who behaved well in their lives. It is also perfectly reasonable that the degree to which a person behaves should influence how receptive we are to their work. I’m sure if I brought you an excellent painting by the child rapist and cannibal Albert Fish, you wouldn’t want it on your wall.
I fully agree with that. But those of us who have a moral breaking point (for me: Ezra Pound, De Sade, and the German art-school dropout dictator are among the pretty-much “cancelled”) may do rough case-by-case assessments of how good the work is and how bad the person behind it seems to be.
I think that creating great art can be one part of the “balanced breakfast” of being a good and useful person, and of making a meaningful–if not blameless or saintly– impact on the world.
Admittedly removed from his political motives by time and clime, I’d say more of Byron’s redeeming notes were poetical than revolutionary. In fact, his fondness for Greek and Italian causes was inspired in large part by his love of the Bardic and Lyrical tradition, as seen from his idealistic but sincere point of view. His intellect and lyrical gift were rare and real, joined to a passionate heart that was not very good or kind. As a personality he’s a good bit like John Wilmot, 2nd Earl or Rochester (1647-1680)–but with much more talent.
Just to include something strictly factual in my comment, Byron (1788-1824) died at 36, not 37.
Please enjoy four stanzas of Childe Harold if so inclined:
LX.
O thou, Parnassus! whom I now survey,
Not in the frenzy of a dreamer’s eye,
Not in the fabled landscape of a lay,
But soaring snow-clad through thy native sky,
In the wild pomp of mountain majesty!
What marvel if I thus essay to sing?
The humblest of thy pilgrims passing by
Would gladly woo thine echoes with his string,
Though from thy heights no more one muse will wave her wing.
LXI.
Oft have I dreamed of thee! whose glorious name
Who knows not, knows not man’s divinest lore:
And now I view thee, ’tis, alas, with shame
That I in feeblest accents must adore.
When I recount thy worshippers of yore
I tremble, and can only bend the knee;
Nor raise my voice, nor vainly dare to soar,
But gaze beneath thy cloudy canopy
In silent joy to think at last I look on thee!
LXII.
Happier in this than mightiest bards have been,
Whose fate to distant homes confined their lot,
Shall I unmoved behold the hallowed scene,
Which others rave of, though they know it not?
Though here no more Apollo haunts his grot,
And thou, the Muses’ seat, art now their grave,
Some gentle spirit still pervades the spot,
Sighs in the gale, keeps silence in the cave,
And glides with glassy foot o’er yon melodious wave.
LXIII.
Of thee hereafter.—Even amidst my strain
I turned aside to pay my homage here;
Forgot the land, the sons, the maids of Spain;
Her fate, to every free-born bosom dear;
And hailed thee, not perchance without a tear.
Now to my theme—but from thy holy haunt
Let me some remnant, some memorial bear;
Yield me one leaf of Daphne’s deathless plant,
Nor let thy votary’s hope be deemed an idle vaunt.
LXIV.
But ne’er didst thou, fair mount, when Greece was young,
See round thy giant base a brighter choir;
Nor e’er did Delphi, when her priestess sung
The Pythian hymn with more than mortal fire,
Behold a train more fitting to inspire
The song of love than Andalusia’s maids,
Nurst in the glowing lap of soft desire:
Ah! that to these were given such peaceful shades
As Greece can still bestow, though Glory fly her glades.
* I like this practice of marking the “death anniversary” of notable writers, as UnHerd also did with John Stuart Mill’s dead-for-150th.
Mark Phillips
18 days ago
I have little time for Eagleton as most of his writings are rather poor and biased. I was, however, enjoying this up until the prune started ranting about BJ. I have little time for Boris but he needs to get a grip. Let down once again by his hatred.
Martin Smith
18 days ago
Terry as professor of literature, excellent, although Johnson’s essentially middle-class peccadilloes seem pale in comparison to those of a real aristocrat.
John Hilton-O’Brien
18 days ago
Like Byron, the author mistakes a personal proclivity for something relevant. Lots of us readers are from Canada. We don’t care much about *Trump,* let alone Johnson. In fact, we have forgotten everything about Johnson aside from the fact that he was briefly PM – and that will be forgotten next year. He isn’t relevant or even vaguely interesting.
Eagleton might as well be throwing out an in-joke about a local pub in Midldesex. He thinks he’s shocking us, but the reason we are irked is that it is simply banal..
Matt Sylvestre
17 days ago
It seems human nature that one of extremes tends to treat those very close poorly and those very far very well or vice versa but never both groups the same… I know which sort I prefer…
I guess Terry Eagleton is not a fan of Boris Johnson? It strikes an uneven note in an otherwise interesting article.
I thought that. Whatever you think of Johnson depicting him as a bargain basement incestuous, debauched, borderline animal abuser seems a bit much.
No, he just abuses women. The difference seems small to me.
It does seem a bit gratuitous, does not it?
Johnson governed in the exact opposite way he campaigned, particularly during COVID. But the comparison to Byron is nonsensical. A better Byron would be, say, Charlie Sheen, or Hunter Biden, if Biden fils had any discernable talents.
But neither of those three men had Byron’s artistic gifts, nor the sincerity of his political beliefs, nor his aesthetic sense. Byron, depraved as he often was, believed in his political causes.
Johnson really just approached his causes as a careerist would, albeit with a bustling incompetence.
Eagleton belongs to that relatively small club of exclusively left-wing academic aristocrats. Not actual aristocrats of course, just the gatekeepers to their profession.
No, he emphatically does not like Boris Johnson, though at this stage whether that’s because Boris is ostensibly a right-winger, or because Boris proved to the world that left-wing politics will f**k up a country just as effectively when implemented by a right-winger – that’s something only Terry could answer, and wouldn’t answer it honestly anyway.
Eagleton is very clever though: I read Literary Theory, a book he wrote well over 30 years ago, and I read it just after I’d read the David Lodge novels about Rummidge University (clearly intended by Lodge to be 1970s Birmingham but renamed either through poetic licence, or possibly out of a desire not to be sued by the same people who thought a Telly Savalas voiceovered film would attract tourists to the city). The novels were about the tension arising at the time between classical, comparative literary criticism and the post-modern structuralist approach, against a backdrop of the hilarious contrast of academia’s experience of Britain’s 1970s declinism with America’s simultaneous extravagance.
In the Lodge novels this was mainly light-hearted and comedic, but once I read Eagleton’s book, it became apparent how fundamental these areas are to the ambition of academia to remain politically relevant and wield political influence. Eagleton’s relating of the history of postmodernism in a literary academic context is actually rather fascinating.
It’s a law of nature that anything Terry writes must feature a dig against the right, or in Boris’s case the “right”.
I agree
What about Taylor Swift why is she a tortured poet ?
You know, I always here about people being debauched, but never about them being bauched to begin with. What does that entail, exactly?
Can you be rebauched after being debauched- like Don Juan giving all his wealth to the church and going celibate – though I reckon he did that just because he got old ..
Looking online for the etymology doesn’t take you very far . From Middle French desbaucher meaning to entice from work or duty but no one seems to know where that comes from .
In these circumstances I revert to my very large and very splendid 1914 Chambers’ English Dictionary, and this is what is says:
O.Fr. desbaucher (Fr. débaucher), to corrupt – des = L. dis, and baucher, to hew – bauche or bauc, a beam, a course of stones.
So, if you are bauched you are hewn, like a beam of wood, and if debauched you are dismembered in some spiritual way.
Hope that helps!
Build a bridge out of ‘er!
I’m not an etymologist, but I suspect the meaning of the Old French baucher might mean hewing a beam from a piece of wood so that it becomes relatively ‘straight’ and, therefore, serviceable as a beam. So, assuming that achieving ‘straightness’ of beam is an essential quality of ‘baucher’, then ‘debaucher’ would mean to cause something to go ‘off-course’ or deviate from the norm. Hence the word ‘debauch’. I have heard a very old French folksong which talks about sailors being ‘débauchiers des filles’, so it’s been around for ages.
Thanks for the etymology!
On a related note, some of you might like this video from RobWords on “lost positives” in English.
https://youtu.be/a7TfjCIbtng?si=tmNIpGNWUkoQt10Q
I have the same problem with “uncouth”.
What does it mean to be couth?
I bet the people who want us to eat bugs and ride bicycles instead of driving cars know the answer.
Excellent! This would have been a good lecture for undergrads at Oxford.
Byron was talented, but his sybaritic tastes can close to ruining him. In modern-day terms, there is a thin dividing line between David Bowie and Amy Winehouse.
Like James Kirkpatrick and David Ochterlony, Byron found a freedom and a spiritual home in foreign climes that he never felt in Britain. Byron did not need to go as far as India, he found what he needed in the Mediterranean. It’s ironic that Byron’s political legacy – Greece – still endures long after the British Raj vanished. Who could have foretold that in the 1820s?
India is the political legacy of the British Empire more than Greece is the political legacy of Byron .
Well, of course. The British East India Company was enormous, and in many cases ran the colonial offices. And, corrupt as it sometimes was, not always for the worse.
Byron, sincere as he was about Greece and Italy, was pretty much a tourist.
DON’T FORGET the sportive Orientalist Gary Glitter, poor fellow, now buried under a hundred tons of British Hypocrisy!
You prefer the French attitude to their version of Gary Glitter L’orientaliste sportif Michel Foucault ?
Though of course the great philosopher had his Thais in Morocco .
I don’t believe the French today are any less petrified by the signifier “underage” than the British, n’est-ce pas? BTW, Mr Glitter’s consorts were in Cambodia, not Thailand, should that difference matter to you perchance…
No mention of Mary Shelley and Frankenstein. I wonder what the writer means by that.
Percy Bysse Shelley completely ignored, as well. Much like the pre-Raphaelites, a far bigger talent.
When I was young I cared more about an artist’s works than the person that they are or were. I’m now of the opposite opinion. I couldn’t care less how excellent his poetry was, the man was grotesque.
So many of the (male) writers I admire were detestable human beings – serial adulterers, alcoholics and abandoners of families.
If they’re mediocrities like Byron, they can be safely ignored. The stuff quoted above is pure banality.
Arguably so. But it is pertinent to his love of Greece, sounds good to my ear, of interest to some versifiers like myself, and not bad for a 23-year-old.
“A mediocrity” is a pretty absurd dismissal of Byron. But an understandable if harsh take on the 4 stanzas I pasted: they’re more stilted and archaic than his norm, partly because they address a personified Mt. Parnassus, I think.
Byron is not near the top of my list but I think he’s underrated. Which 19th-century poets do you like?
Kipling, Keats, Poe,Tennyson.
Good group. Suspected you’d say Tennyson–I find him occasionally stirring, often dull and flat. Kipling and Poe seem minor (not trivial or mediocre) as poets. Full agreement on Keats, whose inclusion on your list surprises me a bit, in a good way. Unsolicited, I’ll nominate Wordsworth, Whitman, and Dickinson.
Shelley. Byron not so much.
I prefer 18th century poets especially Pope, and also Donne and Thomas Nash, and have a soft spot for Eliot, Pound and Anthony Burgess.
Donne Yay ! I think late 16th century to 1650 is hotspot . Recently been chanting out loud Marlowe Hero and Leander , Robert Herrick’s gorgeous poems , Henry King’s Exequy to His Matchless , Never to Be Forgotten Friend ( both funny and touching ) , Jonson , Marvell and early Milton ( so far never got through Paradise Lost )
Even Henry Vaughan’s religious poems are amazing as works of art ( try to ignore the piety )
I pretty much ignore 18th century , then Keats , Browning , Swinburne , Hardy , Housman , Arthur Symonds , Kipling too
I’m in partial agreement–character and behavior matter and at the extremes become a legitimate part of the legacy–though having read some of his better work before I knew how grotesque Byron could be means he is sort of (great-great-great) “grandfathered in” for me.
When you say you’ve adopted the “opposite opinion” I don’t guess you now rank artist’s solely by their qualities as a person, as in: “her voice is tuneless and shrill but she was such a good mother and citizen, so I’m a big fan” or “this book is a masterwork and I wish I could praise it–but he was a deadbeat dad and voted for the wrong candidates.”
Well no, as my original opinion wasn’t informed exclusively by artistic quality, the opposite view wouldn’t be based exclusively on the personal integrity of the artistic. I just value artistic brilliance less than I used to because I think that writing a great poem is less important than being a good human being.
One’s judgement of a “good human being” is very much subjective.
But most people possess common decency, hence the term.
Few of us write or create something like Byron – or Hemingway, or Wilde, or Picasso, or Stravinski. Cheever. Bukowski, of course. Edward Westin, John Lennon, David Bowie.
Would anyone say they all treated women well, were loving and dependable fathers, and were upstanding citizens?
No. But they created works of great beauty and meaning.
Good men are fairly commonplace, and thank heavens for that. Great men are rarely good, but are very uncommon, and we benefit from their greatness, if not their rectitude.
Wilde, I’ll give you, but pick some better examples. Does anyone read Hemingway anymore? I was bored to tears by him in HS. And Picasso is dreck. I you gave me a Picasso and I couldn’t sell it, and my choices were to hang it in my living room or burn it, I’d make a nice fire.
Modern art was about the only thing the Nazis were right about. The world would be a much more beautiful place if 95% of it didn’t exist.
And, to hear them tell it, 95% of the people–whom they get to choose and eliminate. I guess your negationist cultural tendencies overlap with the Bolsheviks here too.
Plenty of people still read Hemingway, far fewer Byron. You seem to think that anyone you don’t read or like has been proven worthless or mediocre.
Very well stated; better than I did in trying to make a similar point below, before noticing your reply. That’s a challenging list of “complicated”, uncommon artists.
What’s challenging about it, and what is an uncommon artist?
For example: The moral shortcomings or personality flaws of two of the specific artists present a major life vs. work challenge to the present-day reader, for me anyway: Hemingway was a womanizing drunk with an oversized machismo who killed himself–but not reducible to that; Wilde groomed teenage boys for his dalliances (paying dearly for it in the end) and was ludicrously amoral and effete–but not only, as evidenced by The Ballad of Reading Gaol. I don’t dismiss the character and behavior of these enduring authors, but it doesn’t seem to erase their literary accomplishments. Nor do I regard them as pure villains in the human sense. And who I am to judge once I (try to) put aside my opinions, assumptions, and unearned gavel?
I meant “uncommon” in the sense of being influential and widely read and admired 60 and 120 years after their respective deaths. With no imminent danger of falling out of print.
I agree with your “child rapist on the wall” point below, and would estimate that I’m not far off from your overall point of view, though we emphasize different sides of the equation, and have different lists of who was just too far beyond certain limits. I wouldn’t have a statue of Byron on my desk, but I will read some of his work. I can understand why some would say: “Forget it, he wasn’t that good”.
Goodness is nuanced and often context dependent, but it’s not as subjective as you are implying. We all have a solid biblical framework to draw on which can be referred to any time, and a legal framework built on top of that.
As for Byron, shagging little boys and close relations is not good. There is no subjectivity to worry about regarding it.
As for the thesis “great people are always bad people” or “to create great things one must behave awfully” – one could easily make a list of prominent people who behaved well in their lives. It is also perfectly reasonable that the degree to which a person behaves should influence how receptive we are to their work. I’m sure if I brought you an excellent painting by the child rapist and cannibal Albert Fish, you wouldn’t want it on your wall.
I think Bukowski’s crap.
I fully agree with that. But those of us who have a moral breaking point (for me: Ezra Pound, De Sade, and the German art-school dropout dictator are among the pretty-much “cancelled”) may do rough case-by-case assessments of how good the work is and how bad the person behind it seems to be.
I think that creating great art can be one part of the “balanced breakfast” of being a good and useful person, and of making a meaningful–if not blameless or saintly– impact on the world.
It’s hard to ignore ‘The Wasteland’ and the implications that all modern poetry is anti semitic by definition.
I’m philosemitic, and still consider the Wasteland great poetry, despite having written a full-length parody
https://rcraven.substack.com/p/the-wastemen
Admittedly removed from his political motives by time and clime, I’d say more of Byron’s redeeming notes were poetical than revolutionary. In fact, his fondness for Greek and Italian causes was inspired in large part by his love of the Bardic and Lyrical tradition, as seen from his idealistic but sincere point of view. His intellect and lyrical gift were rare and real, joined to a passionate heart that was not very good or kind. As a personality he’s a good bit like John Wilmot, 2nd Earl or Rochester (1647-1680)–but with much more talent.
Just to include something strictly factual in my comment, Byron (1788-1824) died at 36, not 37.
Please enjoy four stanzas of Childe Harold if so inclined:
LX.
O thou, Parnassus! whom I now survey,
Not in the frenzy of a dreamer’s eye,
Not in the fabled landscape of a lay,
But soaring snow-clad through thy native sky,
In the wild pomp of mountain majesty!
What marvel if I thus essay to sing?
The humblest of thy pilgrims passing by
Would gladly woo thine echoes with his string,
Though from thy heights no more one muse will wave her wing.
LXI.
Oft have I dreamed of thee! whose glorious name
Who knows not, knows not man’s divinest lore:
And now I view thee, ’tis, alas, with shame
That I in feeblest accents must adore.
When I recount thy worshippers of yore
I tremble, and can only bend the knee;
Nor raise my voice, nor vainly dare to soar,
But gaze beneath thy cloudy canopy
In silent joy to think at last I look on thee!
LXII.
Happier in this than mightiest bards have been,
Whose fate to distant homes confined their lot,
Shall I unmoved behold the hallowed scene,
Which others rave of, though they know it not?
Though here no more Apollo haunts his grot,
And thou, the Muses’ seat, art now their grave,
Some gentle spirit still pervades the spot,
Sighs in the gale, keeps silence in the cave,
And glides with glassy foot o’er yon melodious wave.
LXIII.
Of thee hereafter.—Even amidst my strain
I turned aside to pay my homage here;
Forgot the land, the sons, the maids of Spain;
Her fate, to every free-born bosom dear;
And hailed thee, not perchance without a tear.
Now to my theme—but from thy holy haunt
Let me some remnant, some memorial bear;
Yield me one leaf of Daphne’s deathless plant,
Nor let thy votary’s hope be deemed an idle vaunt.
LXIV.
But ne’er didst thou, fair mount, when Greece was young,
See round thy giant base a brighter choir;
Nor e’er did Delphi, when her priestess sung
The Pythian hymn with more than mortal fire,
Behold a train more fitting to inspire
The song of love than Andalusia’s maids,
Nurst in the glowing lap of soft desire:
Ah! that to these were given such peaceful shades
As Greece can still bestow, though Glory fly her glades.
* I like this practice of marking the “death anniversary” of notable writers, as UnHerd also did with John Stuart Mill’s dead-for-150th.
I have little time for Eagleton as most of his writings are rather poor and biased. I was, however, enjoying this up until the prune started ranting about BJ. I have little time for Boris but he needs to get a grip. Let down once again by his hatred.
Terry as professor of literature, excellent, although Johnson’s essentially middle-class peccadilloes seem pale in comparison to those of a real aristocrat.
Like Byron, the author mistakes a personal proclivity for something relevant. Lots of us readers are from Canada. We don’t care much about *Trump,* let alone Johnson. In fact, we have forgotten everything about Johnson aside from the fact that he was briefly PM – and that will be forgotten next year. He isn’t relevant or even vaguely interesting.
Eagleton might as well be throwing out an in-joke about a local pub in Midldesex. He thinks he’s shocking us, but the reason we are irked is that it is simply banal..
It seems human nature that one of extremes tends to treat those very close poorly and those very far very well or vice versa but never both groups the same… I know which sort I prefer…
“He loved humanity but couldn’t stand people” always makes me laugh.
I don’t associate Byron with Oscar Wilde or Boris Johnson. He seems more like an English version of the Marquis de Sade.