Word: byronic
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...author roguishly reports. Why? Because the poet Swinburne, who in real life had curious difficulties with the opposite sex, is killed while adventuring in the royal seraglio. The scandal is smoothed over, however, partly because of the good feeling left by the fervently pro-Moorish writings of Lord Byron, who does not die at Missolonghi in 1824, according to Guedalla, but lives on in Granada until...
...Byron also survives his Missolonghi fever in a wicked imagining by Harold Nicholson, who in his essay has the poet fumble on till 1854-as nothing less than King George I of Greece, "an obese little man descending the steps of the Crystal Palace on his wooden leg, supporting himself on his famous umbrella, and clasping a huge red handkerchief in the other hand." The wooden leg has replaced the clubfoot of Byron's dashing early years, which the poet-King lost, along with all vestiges of poetic vision, while fighting ineptly against the Turks near Lepanto...
...still dream of reunification. His unconcealed hatred of the Soviet and East Berlin regimes made him the leading opponent in the Bundestag of former Chancellor Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik. He has not budged in his position. Interviewed recently in his Munich penthouse, he told TIME Correspondent Christopher Byron: "Ostpolitik's trade deals are absurd. First we offer to sell the Soviets something; then we give them the money to buy it. That's a marvelous way of doing business, isn't it? We should concentrate on improving relations with our friends instead of our enemies...
...only does Auden seem to be arguing for the kind of standardization he once accused totalitarianism of creating, but he seems to have forfeited--and it sounds at least partly intentional--one of his best poetic voices. Auden was the greatest writer of English light verse since Byron. He could make ideas sound "truer than true" without criminal oversimplification, and in long poems like New Year Letter and Letter to Lord Byron he had proved himself as effective at satirizing the condition of modern man as at prescribing for it. In the process, he came up with such sparkling intellectual...
...Lord Byron looked with chagrin upon all the foreign tourists visiting one of his favorite countries and complained that Italy was "pestilent with English." Italy is quite a bit different this year-and so is every other country in Europe. Not only are many Britons spending the summer of' 74 back in their own backyards but so are other Europeans, as well as the usually ubiquitous Japanese and the big-tipping Americans. Tourism, which ranks among the world's largest industries in terms of money spent abroad, is in a slough...