THE UNCONDITIONAL BYRON

Everyone agrees that Lord Byron was a genius. Almost nobody can say where the genius is kept. Is it in the limp, the open collar, the half-sister, the exile and the fever in Greece - in the most efficiently manufactured legend of the nineteenth century? Or is it on the page, in lines that still make strangers laugh out loud two hundred years after the man who wrote them stopped being scandalous?
This book refuses to settle the matter by temperament. It puts the question as a fork and tests both prongs. It takes Byron's life apart with a formal method for the deconstruction of biographical narrative, reading his biographies, his separation papers and the conflicting versions of his story that different nations still tell. It takes the poems apart with the same instruments, quoting them in the original and at length, from "She Walks in Beauty" and "The Destruction of Sennacherib" to the whole sweep of Childe Harold and the great comic engine of Don Juan. And it does something criticism rarely attempts: it deconstructs the sound itself, treating every rhyme as an assertion, every closing couplet as a counter-assertion and every pause as a fact - and then it counts.
The answer the book reaches is neither the legend nor the text, but the machine that made the two trade places. Byron was the first poet to perform deconstruction on himself, in public, in rhyme, and to make it pay. That is where the genius lives, and why it comes without conditions.
Funny where Byron is funny and plain where he is plain, this is a book for readers who have been told for years that Byron matters and would finally like to hear why.
Keywords: Lord Byron, poetry, genius, deconstruction, biography, sound of verse, Romanticism