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Byron and Hemans Seminar Worksheet Advance preparation: you need to have read the whole of Byron’s Dramatic Poem, Manfred (59-89) before the seminar, Hemans’ ‘Properzia Rossi’ (100-2) and the opening stanzas of Byron’s Don Juan (89-90)

Don Juan: Byron and Romanticism Don Juan is by far Byron’s most important and influential work, but difficult to tackle all in one go. One useful way into the poem is to begin by comparing it to a classic Romantic text like The Prelude (go back and look at a short extract e.g. (51 “Was it for this....in the thunder shower”). Read first 6 stanzas of the Dedication to Don Juan (89-90). Begin by discussing your general responses to the two poems. Move on to compare in detail the following aspects of the poems: Form and style (rhyme schemes, metre, shape of poem on page etc) Use of imagery Poetic persona Poet’s relationship to his material Subject of the poem Try to sum up the differences between the two texts in a sentence or two. Discuss Byron’s attitude to the first generation Romantics. In what ways does he intend his poetry to be fundamentally different?

Byron and Hemans: Gender and the Romantic Artist The Byronic Hero: Manfred (1817) Re-read the long soliloquy spoken by Manfred, which begins the poem and in which he describes his isolated consciousness (59-60, ll. 1-49), and the whole of the final scene (Act III, scene 4, 85-9) Discuss the following questions: What is the nature of Manfred’s suffering? How much do you find out about the cause of this suffering? In what ways is he different to other men? What is ‘the strong curse….upon his soul’? What do you think the poem is saying about the conscious mind and its relation to the external world? Try to define the ‘Byronic hero’ from your reading of these passages. What are his key characteristics? How do you respond to this figure?

Hemans and the Female Artist Go on to look at Felicia Hemans’ poem ‘Properzia Rossi’ (1828), 100-2. Although you need to have read the poem in its entirety by way of preparation, for the purpose of the discussion, you only need to closely re-read the epigraph and stanzas 1 and 2. Discuss the poem’s summary and epigraph. What does this tell us about the female artist and woman’s happiness? Comment on the division between the famous persona of the artist and the solitary ‘I’ in these lines. Discuss the relationship between the artist and the artistic product (in this case a sculpture, but it could by extension be a poem or painting) Try to summarise the message of these stanzas. In what ways does Hemans’ artist differ from the male artist as projected into the persona of the Byronic hero?

How, in these two poems, is gender shown to affect the ‘self’?...