Annual Byron Society Lecture in Scotland, 13th February, 2020
By Dr Daniel Cook
6.00-7.30 pm, 50 George Square, Edinburgh
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This is the Byron Society’s second Annual Scotland Lecture.
This is a free public lecture, organised in association with The Centre for the History of the Book.
Booking is required. Email contact@thebyronsociety.com to book a place.
Looking back on his early life in Aberdeen, Byron declared that he was “half a Scot by birth, and bred / A whole one”. In August 1798, he left Scotland to take up his English title, never to return. [/ezcol_2third_end]
But in his imagination he kept revisiting Scottish landscapes in poems such as ‘Lachin y Gair’ (“England! thy beauties are tame and domestic, / To one, who has rov’d on the mountains afar”) and ‘Song’ (“When I roved, a young Highlander, o’er the dark heath, / And climbed thy steep summit, oh Morven of snow!”). In a ballad, ‘Golice Macbane’, he honours Scottish warriors (“With thy back to the wall, and thy breast to the targe, / Full flashed thy claymore in the face of their charge”). Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, as many critics have pointed out, glimpses a guilt-ridden Byronic hero shaped by Scottish Calvinism. What happens when we read Byron’s poetry more firmly in the context of his Anglo-Scottish identity? Is such poetry “Scottish” in its form or content, or perhaps something else entirely? How have other poets responded to Byron’s Scottish poems?
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DETAILS
[ezcol_1third]Where:
The Project Room, 1st Floor
50 George Square,
Edinburgh
[/ezcol_1third] [ezcol_1third]When
Drinks at 6.00
Lecture 6.30-7.30pm
[/ezcol_1third] [ezcol_1third_end]Tickets:
This is a free lecture, but booking is required.
Email contact@thebyronsociety.com to book a place.
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