The Byronic hero; what others can say about him; what he can say about himself. The coherence of writing poetry when your lacerated breast is no longer capable of feeling pleasure or pain, hope or fear. Who should narrate the Byronic hero? Milton's narrator? Julian?Lockwood? The importance of seeing Byron's range, as given by Shelley in Julian and Maddalo (that unutterably wonderful poem), and by Byron in his own letters -- all this as the beginning of an introduction to Don Juan. The perfection of the change of tone in the canceled stanza on the MS of Canto I: "I would to heaven I were so much clay," &c.
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