What we're reading, what we're liking
The Selected Poetry and Prose of Byron, edited and introduced by W.H. Auden
Its $1 price tag and its introduction by a poet even better than the main attraction made me snap up this little paperback at a used-book store in upstate New York (alas, it's out of print). Auden maintains that the famously "mad, bad and dangerous to know" literary heartthrob was actually at his best when writing prose and comic poems, rather than the brooding Romantic verse epics that won Lord Byron acclaim in his own time. He's right, judging by this selection; Byron's letters and journals practically jump off the page with wit and vitality. And while no one remembers the writings of the minor literati skewered in some of Byron's best, gossipy verse, they attain a painful kind of immortality, particularly one Sam Rogers, of whom the wayward lord wrote: "You're his foe, for that he fears you/And in absence blasts and sears you:/You're his friend -- for that he hates you,/First caresses, and then baits you."
-- Laura Miller
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