Reading Byron

Reviews / Votes

Reviews 'This essay collection is a treasure trove containing the accumulated riches from a life of teaching and scholarship.'
Peter Graham, Professor Emeritus in the Department of English, Virginia Tech 'Bernard Beatty's Reading Byron: Poems - Life - Politics offers a dazzling series of insights from a venerable Byron scholar... Beatty's work is most distinguished across these three sections by its wonderfully refined close reading... Beatty thus achieves something close to his subject: a liveliness and a distinctive voice that is eminently readable despite the complexity of his thinking. I can think of few higher compliments.' Jonathan Sachs, Review of English Studies 'This superb and thought-provoking book asks a lot of but offers a great deal to any reader of Byron. In Beatty's willingness to read Byron carefully, to seek and find in him ideas of depth and significance, while being able to laugh with him, we receive a blueprint for how to work with poets who, perhaps because and not in spite of their fame, have become more talked about than read. Reading Byron should become one of the cornerstones for anyone--student, scholar, or fan--who would go deeper and pay Byron's poetry the same attention that brought Beatty's work into being.' Madeleine Callaghan, Review 19 'Beatty is intent on tracing in the poems what he calls a "Catholic trajectory", a learning curve that takes Byron deeper and deeper into the recesses of the human soul. He offers, among other things, compelling accounts of "the darkness of sin" in "Lara" and the unexpected orthodoxy of Byron's play Cain, usually characterized as a sceptic's charter... Beatty writes throughout with enviable lucidity and expository grace, while allowing himself a few moments of the senior clubman.' Seamus Perry, Times Literary Supplement 'Reading Byron comes as a welcome and lasting record of Beatty's critical mind in action. At once elegant and pugnacious, pragmatic and deeply felt, this collection of essays illuminates central precincts of Byron's life and work while also casting light on some unexpected corners. It is a model of critical engagement, grounded in extensive, repeated readings and full to bursting with arresting observations.'

Andrew Stauffer, Studies in Romanticism 'Reading Byron is an extended, accessible, and extremely personal meditation on the act of reading Byron-not only the poetry itself, but also his physical locations and his politics.'

Emily Paterson-Morgan, European Romantic Review 'All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed Reading Byron, especially because of how Beatty succeeds at displaying the religiously skeptical, populist aristocratic, globally nationalist poet through, above all, his body of literature, a corpus that, as Beatty reminds us, contains many witty, humorous, contemplative, and philosophical pleasures.' Omar F. Miranda, The Wordsworth Circle