Page 48 - Beholding Liberty!

I.1.7
Lord Byron
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, A Romaunt: And Other Poems.
Fourth edition.
London: Printed by T. Davison, Whitefriars, for John Murray, Fleet-Street; William Blackwood, and J. Ballantyne and Co. Edinburgh; and J. Cumming, Dublin. 1812.
Library of the Hellenic Parliament
THIS IS THE SECOND EDITION, in the same year (1812) as the first, of The Pilgrimage of Childe Harold, which made Lord Byron famous overnight as he acknowledged, since the 500 cop- ies of the first edition (March 3) were sold out in only three days.
It is a strongly autobiographical long narrative poem, published in four parts between 1812 and 1818, based on the author’s travels in the Mediter- ranean between 1809-11.
Lord Byron (George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, 1788-1824), is an account of the travels of a young man who, disenchanted with his life as a social- ite, seeks adventure in foreign lands. It is imbued with the melancholy and fin-de-siècle atmosphere in Britain of the period after the Napoleonic Wars.
It was an extraordinary success, not only in publishing and literary terms, but also for the arts of the time in general, inspiring music and the visual arts, and establishing the melancholic Romantic Byronic hero.
With regard to the Greek world – mainly described in Canto II – he captures the beauty of the histor- ical land that has come under the despotic Otto- man rule, which he experienced first-hand during his early visits (1810-11). He consequently estab- lished the poetic representation of Greece in the West, inspiring a philhellenic sentiment. Indeed, it spawned other works, such as Felicia Hemans’s Modern Greece: A Poem (1817), and was a precursor of purely philhellenic poetry, such as Percy Bysshe Shelley’s verse drama Hellas (written in 1821, pub- lished in 1822).
48 BEHOLDING LIBERTY!