The inspiration of poetry Author:George Edward Woodberry Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: IV BYRON It is an error to think of Byron as an English poet; he was expatriated not only in his person but in his genius; and this partly accounts for the... more » fact that his reputation so soon became, and still remains, Continental. He was not a poet of what was always, for him, the dismal island of his birth. He was rather a poet of the Mediterranean world. There he found the main material of his works, — the motive, the stage, the incidents, and the inspiration, — the picturesque and romantic scene of his imagination, ranging from the Straits of Gibraltar to the Golden Horn. He stamped his memory there — still felt — from Calpe to Stamboul. Portugal and Spain, Albania and Greece were his earliest topics in verse after his boyish preluding was done; Italywas the main theme of his most majestic manhood poetry; and by a nearer and internal tie the Italian literary tradition entered into his genius and characterized his style. England need not have troubled to refuse him so often and so long a niche in the Abbey; for wherever his bones may lie or tablets of grateful honor be erected, Greece is the true shrine of his memory, and will always be so. In all things that pertain to the immortal part of him, he thus belongs to the Mediterranean; and it is only in the perspective of those broken coasts, in the purple of those lonely islands, in the high atmosphere of those snow-clad and thronging peaks that his genius is seen as in its home. He was but a youth and in the first flush of his poetic blood, when the Mediterranean revelation came to him, on his first voyage. He entered the south by Lisbon. The moment was a true awakening; and so natural that he was not aware the poet was born in him; and later he was still clinging to his adolescent and apprentice work — such as the "Hints ...« less