Reviewed in the United States on May 12, 2021
...it is, after all, the whole product we are rating here, and not just the poet and his poetry packaged into it. Byron is worth 10 stars, of course. But...:
(a) the selection and compilation is not ideal, making the entire book too unwieldy to be really enjoyable. I agree with a previous comment: Don Juan should have been hived off into a separate volume; The Corsair and Lara should be there in full, plus a few other great poems
(b) the introduction by Jerome McGann is disgraceful and not worthy of Byron. As a German reader I cannot help but stumble over comments such as the following, and wonder if this person, a professor of "Victorian Studies" (whatever that's supposed to be) knows what he is doing:
"no other literary figure, not even Goethe, was so widely and actively engaged with the important people and events of his time." A curious statement: everyone knows that Goethe tried as hard as he could to stay away from the great politics of his age; he met Napoleon, but only at the latter's request; he shunned the great capitals, Vienna, Paris, London, etc. and went to Berlin only reluctantly, on business with his Duke. Having said this, he was famous for nearly 60 years (1773-1832), most of which he spend in Weimar, which just happens to be exactly on the main West-East Axis of Europe, from Paris to Moscow, and also on a major North-South Axis, from Hamburg and Berlin via Prague to Vienna and on to Budapest and the Balkans. It does not get any more central in Europe than that! As a result, hundreds of famous people passed by during the Age of Goethe (Napoleon did several times), and many stopped over to meet the poet. The ageing Goethe also spent substantial time in the Bohemian spas, where in those days of course tout le monde convened. Byron was famous for 14 years (1810-24), many of which he spent on the European periphery (England, Portugal, Levante, Greece); in the main, he would have had opportunity to "meet the important people of his time" while residing in what McGann terms "Italy" and what politically speaking were Habsburg lands (Venice, Pisa) and Papal lands (Ravenna, Rome), where he spent six years. Without having studied Byron's biography in detail, it is quite simply inconceivable that Byron could even physically have met as many "important people of his time" as did Goethe.
"Napoleon... aimed at the transformation of the political structure of all Europe. His chief adversary in this struggle was England." Now, is this English humour? Or is there simply so much fog over the English Channel that McGann remains entirely ignorant of European history? Napoleon's aims were to seize the Imperial crown, establish the leading European dynasty, and push the boundaries of his Empire beyond the Rhine. In all three of these, Germany, not England, was naturally his "chief adversary"; by 1812 he had more or less achieved them: he had destroyed the Holy Roman Empire and seized the imperial crown (but had not been able to prevent the Habsburg Franz II to simply re-crown himself Emperor of Austria); he had married Franz's daughter Marie-Louise and thereby legitimised his imperial dynasty, and he had occupied much of Germany or controlled it as his satellites via the Confederacy of the Rhine. He failed to subdue Prussia and Russia, and that would be his undoing. England did not feature large in any of this. England controlled the sea, and that was a big headache for Napoleon's trade and supply of war material, but she did not have a major land army and did not participate in any of the decisive land battles of the Napoleonic wars (she did at Waterloo, but that battle was more of an afterthought: Napoleon was defeated in Russia and in Saxony, and returning from Elba his quickly gobbled together rag-tag army would have stood no chance once the Austrians and Russians arrived on the scene with their main armies; Wellington, whose army was even more rag-tag, was about to succumb to him, had not Bluecher's Prussians arrived just in time to bail him out--but again, all of which does not matter very much: Napoleon's days were over). England was always a nuisance for Napoleon, as she was for Hitler some time later, but in neither case was she a "main adversary": she simply did not matter enough (Hitler's focus was on "Lebensraum im Osten," i.e., his main adversary was, qua geography and of necessity, the Soviet Union; Hollywood proffers the impression that the landing in the Normandy was the decisive military turning point, but of course it was Stalingrad). England had 10m inhabitants in 1800; the Holy Roman Empire, France and Russia each had 30m or more. I see a pattern here, in respect to English historicism: be it vis a vis Napoleon, Hitler or more recently the EU, for some reason the English always try to elevate themselves into a role and importance in Europe they quite simply do not have and never had. The interpretation of history they propagate seems to be mere propaganda propelled by some kind of insular inferiority complex. "Fog over the Channel: Europe cut off." Surely McGann must recognise that not all his readers will be this uninformed and uneducated about European history? His Chronology includes a few events that involved Britain; almost none of the major events of the Coalition Wars against Napoleon are mentioned (most of which Britain was not involved with). Yes Britain had some tactical land operations on the "Peninsula" as he calls it (he means the Iberian; perhaps he doesn't know that there are other peninsulas in Europe?), but they were fairly negligible to Napoleon, who only once personally went to Spain, to quickly crush the unruly Spanish and quickly return to the main battlegrounds in Southern Germany. Wellington's small contingents in Portugal he left to his junior generals, as a sort of training boot camp.
"The years--1817-23--saw the beginning of the European settlement under the leadership, not to say the domination, of England." LOL. No, it was under the leadership of the "so-called Holy Alliance," which, mind you, England was not member of. More fog over the Channel. And I suppose the "notorious Congress of Vienna" is only "notorious" to Mr. McGann because England in 1815 played but a minor role in the re-ordering of Europe (as a consolation prize, she was awarded the honourable task of dispatching Napoleon far, far away. Presumable Napoleon chose to surrender to one of her ships precisely because she had been far less involved in his hegemonic raids than had the Germans and Russians; had he surrendered to the Prussians or Austrians, they'd have put him up against the nearest available wall. An English sea captain was a pussycat in comparison).
"students of history and literature have often dated the Romantic Period 1789-1824." Well, in Germany, the mothership of the Romantic movement, nobody does that (the beginnings of it are often identified in the 1750s and 60s, and this includes some important English roots, such as in sentimentalism, which McGann's dating does not seem to acknowledge). The French Revolution was of course intellectually influential on many fronts, but not particularly in so far as Romanticism is concerned, so 1789 is a strange starting point; 1824 (Byron's death) is perhaps more defendable: perhaps he really was the last major Romantic. Maybe McGann's dating is an English convention, but Romanticism came to England late and never really took hold, and it does not help his reader to repeatedly emphasise how European a poet Byron was (which I agree with) but then completely fail to put him into an overall Romantic context.
Apart from writing in the language of shopkeepers, which we shall forgive him, as he does so beautifully (as beautifully as that language allows, anyhow), Byron really was a European poet, and to fully come into his own, he had to exile himself to the continent, because in England he would never have been fully understood. And as McGann's introduction suggests, he is not understood there to this day. The most important Ariadne's thread that runs through his entire works and is the heart of soul of his Byronian hero, his complex sexuality, McGann does not even mention once.