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desire to reform himself, her oppos ite number, as bad as she was good .
In love with Augus ta and deep ly in debt, eager to save hi s soul and hi s
esta te by marrying, Byron wa indeed a cynical sui tor. On the o ther
hand, Annabella rea ll y a ttracted him, p robabl y by her presumptuous
beli ef tha t she saw past the po es wo rshiped by the world to a central
loneliness and seriousness like her own. Writing oddl y labo rious,
sometimes marvelous letters to her in whi ch he summed up and
packaged himself, h e posed so as to reveal, bo th to chall enge her desire
to marry him and to whet it:
1 by no means ran k poetry or poets high in the scale of intell ect-thi s
may look like Affectation-but it is my rea l opinion-it is the lava of
the imagination whose eruption p revents an earth -quake-they say
Poets never or rarely go mad- Cowper &Collins are instances to the
contrary- (but Cowper was no poet)-it is however to be remarked
tha t they rarely do -but are generall y so nea r it-that 1 canno t help
thinking rh yme is so far u sefu l in anticipating & preventing the
d isorder.-I prefer the talents o f
action- o f
war- o r the Senate-or
even o f Science- to all the specu lation s of these mere dreamers of
another ex istence (I don 't mean
religiously
but
fancifu lly)
and
spectators of thi s.-Apathy-disgu st-& perhaps incapacity have
rendered me now a mere spectator-but 1have occas ionally mi xed in
th e active and tumultuous departments of existence- & on these
alone my
reco llection
rests wi th an y satisfaction-tho ugh no t the
best
parts of it.
As a wit and an aristocra ti c adventu rer, a man of reason and a man
o f action, as a revo lutionary and even as a man of sensibility, Byron
voiced di sdain fo r poetry. In 1814 all these poses were fl ashing in and
out of fashi on, and Byron could strike any number of them a t once,
with relish , sincerity, and irony. It is hard to believe he ever thought so
literal-minded a lady as Ann abell a could understand what was going
on; the letters to h er are also, surely, to himself and to posterity,
intended, as he said o f those h e wrote to Lady Melbourne,
"to
burst
upon the twenti eth centu ry." Byron 's letters bare his h eart by showing
how close language was to it. As he grew o lder he perfected hi s fl ex ibl e,
wary style, ready to whirl round or ca tch itself up at any time, full o f
emphases and interruption s, modifica ti on s and distinction s, now
stopp ing to love a detail and then sprinting on to a summary judg–
ment. T hreading th rough the immense variety of things that interested
him, it manages to suggest hi s despera ti on and hi s detachment a t once.
The style is itself, I suppose, the heart o f his mystery.
RACHEL BROWNSTEIN
