Some really good words among all the rambling Cantos:

"Inscription"
"Fare Thee Well!"
"I have not loved the world, nor the world me, -"
Sonnet on Chillon"
"Epistle to Augusta"
"Messalonghi" ( )

I’ve spent a few pleasant moments reading this booklet -- a collection of what I assume are taken to be Byron’s best-known works (with perhaps a few lesser-known surprises thrown in -- I wouldn’t know). Drama and affectations are noticeably there, of course, but also lots of exuberance and bittersweetness. It’s a good selection, varied as it is to bring out the poet’s versatility.

I also must say that a lot of this poetry was very good -- rhythms, cadences and word choices all carefully massaged to sound natural and free-flowing. The man had a way with words, that much is very clear, even at a distance of almost 200 years. ( )

My first contact with the most known satanical Romantic poet hasn’t disappointed. Lord Byron emerges in his poems as the immensely popular hero, defiant, melancholy, haunted by secret guilt, the eternal scandalous irreverent freethinker.

We are the fools of Time and Terror: Days
Steal on us, and steal from us; yet we live,
Loathing our life, and dreading still to die . Manfred

Although this selection doesn’t include his famous Don Juan , I have found plenty of passion and strong emotion in his stanzas, specially in Cain: a Mystery , where he keeps defying not only religious convention, giving Lucifer a clergyman voice:

Speaking about Lucifer

CAIN. He is God.
ADAH. How know’st thou?
CAIN. He speaks like A God.
ADAH. So did the Serpent, and it lied.

but also unashamedly proclaiming his widely known extravagant views on relationships in, for example, making ADAH not only CAIN’s sister but also his wife and lover.

Writer of metaphysical poems, like his famous Manfred, Byron rejects the Wordsworthian belief in the benevolence of Nature and insists on the independence and self-sufficiency of the human mind, which doesn’t bow to any supernatural authority.

I have not been thy dupe nor am thy prey,
But was my own destroyer, and will be
My own hereafter. – Back, ye baffled fiends!
The hand of death is on me – but not yours!

At the same time though, I find a kind of paradox in Byron’s style and the content of his poems. His almost neoclassical order and formal discipline collide with his exulting ideas impregnated with vigorous thoughts of liberty and satirical criticism.

Tyranny
Is far the worst of treasons. Dost thou deem
None rebels except subjects? The prince who
Neglects or violates his trust is more
A brigand than the robber-chief. The Two Foscari

But one thing in common in all his poems is this new figure of the Gothic Hero-Villain full of pride, courage, and even noble virtues such as honor and altruism; but also moody, remorseful, alienated and oppressed in loneliness and incomprehension. Difficult to tell whether Byron was absorbed into his own created characters or he projected his sensitive experiences through them.
And I find great appeal in this flawed new anti-hero, sensing different motivations behind Byron’s works. Lacking the inhibitions of his contemporaries, he created verse that is exuberant, spontaneous, digressive and lucid, celebration of an “unadorned reality.”
One can’t help but admire him. With all his debauchery and flaws. ( )