The Making of the Poets - Hardcover

Gilmour, Ian

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0701171103 ISBN 13: 9780701171100

Publisher: Chatto & Windus, 2002

Synopsis

[Byron, Lord / Shelley] Gilmour, Ian. The Making of the Poets Byron and Shelley in their Time. London, Chatto & Windus, 2002. 16 cm x 24 cm. XIII, 402 pages with illustrations. Original Hardcover with original dustjacket in protective collector's mylar. Excellent condition with only very minor signs of external wear. Includes for example the following contents:- The Byrons and Gordons / Childhood in Aberdeen / The Shelleys and Field Place / Isleworth and Dulwich / Harrow and Eton / Eton and Harrow / Oxford and Cambridge / Cambridge and Oxford / Post-University Blues I / Post-University Blues II / Poetic Madness / Byron's Grand Tour / Return and Luddism / Marriage and Exile / Maiden Speeches etc. Both Byron and Shelley died young. By the time Byron left Harrow, almost half his life was over; and when Shelley left Eton, three-fifths of his life was gone. Ian Gilmour has concentrated on the two poets in their youth, and has told their stories in tandem. Their formative years were packed with incident and had a decisive influence on the later lives of them both. As an historian, Gilmour provides a colourful account of the political, social and economic background to their writings. Byron and Shelley lived in the stormy age of the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars and the post-Napoleon reaction. They became close friends, and though they are usually thought to have been very different from each other, Gilmour shows that they had much more in common than is usually recognised. (Amazon).

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

While Byron and Shelley's friendship was the high point, not only of their brief lives, but also of late British romanticism, Gilmour's engagingly written tandem biography explores their early years, before they met, and the political atmosphere of the French Revolutionary era in which they grew up. Gilmour, a former editor of the Spectator and a Conservative MP, has previously written mostly on politics and economics, but this work on the two poets has a shrewd eye for both their mythmaking and posthumous reputations. Byron and Shelley shared superficially similar backgrounds: aristocratic families, public school and Oxbridge educations, youthful radical sympathies and early travels that would prefigure exile. As Gilmour smartly shows, however, there is a vast gap between an impecunious half-Scots baron and the grandson of a rich baronet, as well as the nuances of Byron's flamboyant experiences at Harrow and Cambridge, compared with Shelley's miseries at Eton and Oxford. After Shelley was expelled from Oxford for his pamphlet "The Necessity of Atheism," there was no turning back from radical politics (which Gilmour still regards with latent Tory amusement), but with Byron, radicalism was something of a flirtation while cementing his notoriety. Gilmour ends right after Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage has caused a sensation, with Shelley only just about to start on his first important poems. A bit more foreshadowing would have made for a more substantive work. While this volume ends abruptly in 1812, its knowledgeable enthusiasm for the two bad boys of romanticism makes one hope for another volume. B&w illus.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Chatto & Windus
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0701171103
• ISBN 13: 9780701171100
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320