This volume offers a wide-ranging, comprehensive selection of Byron's poetry and prose. It includes eighteen of his lyrics; Cantos One, Three, and excerpts from Canto Four of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage; two verse romances, The Professor of Chillon and The Giaour; Manfred; The Vision of Judgment; and Don Juan, presented in long self-contained extracts--the First,Fifth, Ninth, and Sixteenth Cantos complete, with the close of the Second Canto. An unusually rich selection from Byron's letters and journals accompanies the poems.

Preface

The Texts of the Poems

A Note on the Texts

 From Hours oF Idleness (1807)

To M.S.G.

To a Beautiful Quaker

To a Lady Who Presented to the Author a Lock

  of Hair Braided with His Own, and Appointed

  at a Night in December to Meet Him in the

  Garden

On a Distant View of the Village and School

  of Harrow on the Hill, 18o6

I Would I Were a Careless Child

To Edward Noel Long, Esq.

 From Hebrew Melodies (1815)

She Walks in Beauty

The Harp the Monarch Minstrel Swept

My Soul Is Dark

The Destruction of Sennacherib

 Other Lyrics

Written After Swimming from Sestos to Abydos

To Thyrza

Prometheus

Epistle to Augusta

Darkness

So We'll Go No More A-Roving

Versicles

On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year

 Childe Harold's Pilgrimage

Canto the First (1812)

Canto the Third (1816)

Canto the Fourth (verses 1-10, 164-86) (1818)

 The Giaour (1812)

 The Prisoner of Chillon (1816)

  Manfred (1817)

  The Vision of Judgment (1822 )

  Don Juan (1819-24)

Fragment on the Back of the Ms. of Canto the First

Dedication

Canto the First

Canto the Second (verses CXLI-CCXVI)

Canto the Fifth

Canto the Ninth

Canto the Sixteenth

Byron's Letters and Journals

 To His Mother, May 1, 1803

 To Francis Hodgson, November 3, 1808

 To William Harness, March 18, 1809

 To Henry Drury, May 3, 1810

 To Francis Hodgson, September 3, 1811

 To John Murray, September 5, 1811

 To Lady Caroline Lamb, May 1, 1812

 From His Journal, November 1823-April 1814

 To Lady Melbourne, January 7, 1815

 To Lady Byron, February 8, 1816

 To John Murray, September 15, 1817

 To Thomas Moore, February 2, 1818

 To John Cam Hobhouse and the Honorable

Douglas Kinnaird, January 19, 1819

 To the Honorable Douglas Kinnaird, October 26, 1819

 From His "Detached Thoughts,"

October 1821 to May 1822

 To the Honorable Augusta Leigh, September 12, 1823

 To Mr. Mayer, English Consul at Prevesa, undated

Criticism

 Bergen Evans·Lord Byron's Pilgrimage

 John D. Jump·Byron: The Historical Context

 Michael G. Cooke·Byron and the Romantic Lyric

 Francis Berry·The Poet of ChiIde Harold

Robert F. Gleckner·The Giaour as Experimental

  Narrative

James R. Thompson·Byron's Plays and Don Juan

Frank D. McConnell·Byron as Antipoet

Leslie A. Marchand·Byron in the Twentieth Century

E. D. Hirsch, Jr.·Byron and the Terrestrial Paradise

aaages of Byron

Francis Jeffrey·From the Edinburgh Review

  (April 1814)

Lady Caroline Lamb·From Glenarvon (1816)

Thomas Love Peacock·From Nightmare Abbey (1818)

Robert Southey·From A Vision of Judgment (1821)

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe·From Conversations

  with Eckermann (1822-1832 )

Stendhal·Memories of Lord Byron (1829)

Thomas Carlyle·From Sartor Resartus (1838)

Gustave Flaubert·From His Letters (1838 and 1845)

Ralph Waldo Emerson·Thoughts on Modem

  Literature (a84o)

Harriet Beecher Stowe·From Uncle Tom's Cabin

 (185o)

Matthew Arnold·[Byron] (1881)

Oscar Wilde·From The Soul of Man Under Socialism

  (1891)

George Bernard Shaw·Dedicatory Letter to Man and

Superman (19o3)

James Joyce·From A Portrait of the Artist as a Young

  Man (1916)

Virginia Woolf·From A Writer's Diary

  (Wednesday, August 7, 1918)

William Butler Yeats·From A Vision (1922)

T. E. Lawrence·From Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926)

Charles Du Bos·Byron and the Need of Fatality (1931)

Mario Praz·From The Romantic Agony (1933)