6 Comments
May 13Liked by Joseph Bottum

The podcast "The Rest is History" recently released a series of podcasts on the life of Lord Byron. I recommend that for those interested in the man and his times.

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May 13Liked by Joseph Bottum

This is one of those super-fun poems to read, like "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere." Thanks for the re-visit!

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May 10·edited May 10Liked by Sally Thomas

This was in a high school English textbook, and although I was not especially taken with the poem, the first two lines have stayed with me ever since.

"Loud" is a good description of the meter.

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May 10Liked by Sally Thomas, Joseph Bottum

Yes I think if Bertie knows it, everyone knows it. That’s the first thing I thought of when I read it. But I do think the range of reference to Macbeth, in the Code of the Woosters is impressive.

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May 10Liked by Sally Thomas, Joseph Bottum

Some people, at least one person, know the first line because Bertie Wooster did.

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Hah. But this proves, I think, the place of Byron's "The Destruction of Sennacherib" in the old canon. As I wrote some years ago: "You’ll sometimes see [Wodehouse] praised for the wide range of his literary references. Don’t believe it.…Wodehouse’s references—particularly in the first-person with which Bertie Wooster narrates his stories—are almost entirely from the Edwardian schoolboy canon: the Bible and Shakespeare, the kind of Anglican hymn heard in British public schools, Victorian parlor poetry, the Bible and Shakespeare again, a few popular songs from the 1880s, Kipling, and the Bible and Shakespeare once again."

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