Lyro-epic poem. Its roots, genre variations and its peak of development

Seminar 1. Lyro-epic poem in G.G. Byron’s literary work

Lyro-epic poem. Its roots, genre variations and its peak of development

The forming of lyro-epic as a new genre became an important step in the development of literature worldwide. The term „lyro-epic poem” was used to define the mutual penetration of two types of emotional tone – lyrical (subjective emotional tone of the author’s language, narrator’s language, characters’ language) and epical (objective, neutral tone of the broad and versatile narration) in a specific form or genre in literature. The notion of lyro-epic is closely connected with that of “lyrical hero”, which is the structure building notion for the lyro-epic in terms of the events being treated via the prism of a hero’s consciousness.

Though one can trace the roots of this genre in the lyric and epic tradition of Old Celtic and Old English versification and prosaic epics, one can fully observe the genre of lyro-epic in its birth and development during the period of Romanticism. It not only became one of the main genres but also interfered with and influenced upon the genres of epic and drama thus forming new ones. We can speak about the so-called “lyrization” of epical and dramatical genres. These formal innovations were one of the results of the deep change in the way of thinking and worldview in the end of the 18^th and the beginning of the 19^th century in the course of the Sentimentalism and the Romanticism.

O. Balsac called Romantic art “the art of images” and he was right as the Romantics created images of the great mythological scale, the images-myths. The Old Mariner of S.T. Coleridge, Corsair and Mafred of G.G. Byron, Prometheus of P.B. Shelley were not just literary characters. They embodied the global philosophic thought – value of Nature, revolutionary changes in society and so on. Beside of its lyrical features lyro-epic poems were closely connected with the society, politics, and civil issues. This we can see in the works by Byron, Shelley and other Romantics and this influenced greatly appearance of social novel in later decades, the beginning of which we can trace in one of the lyro-epics by Byron – “Don Juan”. However, most of the Romantics dwelled upon eternal themes that are topical within all the epochs. M. Bakhtin said once that the artists of the Romanticism always bring into the art “something chimeric, unreal, gloomy, subconscious” related to the lack of trust in only Wit itself.

Among the main features of the lyro-epic we can underline these:

· The plot depicts mostly the broodings and thoughts of the lyrical hero – hence the lyricism

· The poem pictures the history of a nation’s struggle for independence or a personality struggle for inner or outer independence (the author’s position) – hence the epic

· Narrator doesn’t equal to the lyrical hero

· Topos of them is mostly exotical or at least quite remote

· The so-called “Byronic hero” unites different lyro-epics

· Brightly expressed anthropocentrism

The epic features of these poems help to broaden the chronotopos, i.e. time and space of the lyro-epics. Thus, the Romantics rediscover the past, history, folklore of their nations as well as the necessity of further development. Nevertheless, they not only pay more attention to the national issues, but also are conserned with events worldwide, e.g. Byron’s characters. Moreover, Byron quoted the book “Le Cosmopolite” in the epigraph to his “Child Harold Pilgrimage”: “The world is like a book, and those, who know only their country, read only the first page. I have looked through many ones and for me they seemed equally bad. This was a valuable experience. I had hated my Fatherland. The barbarity of other peoples, which I had outlived, reconciled me with my one.” This is realized in the chronotopos of the way and the motive of freedom in its every manifestation.

The lyrical features of the lyro-epics give a new phase in the development of didactic, philosophical, landscape, love lyrics, etc. The openness of revelation of a character’s feelings has deepened the dramatism of the world perception. The authors tried to show the life of theis heroes’ souls in the lyrism of the poems.

The Romantic movement stressed strong emotion as a source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as trepidation, horror and awe—especially that which is experienced in confronting the sublimity of untamed nature and its picturesque qualities, both new aesthetic categories. It elevated folk art and custom to something noble, and argued for a "natural" epistemology of human activities as conditioned by nature in the form of language, custom and usage. Our modern sense of a romantic character is sometimes based on Byronic or Romantic ideals.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 1283