Romantic and Modern Antiheroes

...As Lloyd remarks, he is "the great olfactory poet of France," attuned to flowers, perfumes, incense, and stinks...

...Theauthorof Les Flews du Mal preferred the dingy, patchwork Paris of his childhood to the promise of a futuristic metropolis aiming to clear out the ordinary grime and the down-and-outers-including the bohemian writers, painters and philosophers at the Café Momus (made famous by La Bohème) and similar Baudelaire haunts...

...She could have found support for several of her claims in W. H. Auden's 1934 "Letter to Lord Byron," yet she never mentions it...

...This was all the more clear, perhaps, in that the abrupt abandonment of those plans in 1812, when Napoleon was exiled to Elba, had not given rise to a similarly ambitious or imaginative program on the part of the Restoration monarchy that replaced him...

...In a 192 8 novel Elinor Wylie imagined Byron and Shelley surviving to be either lionized or ignored by Victorian readers...

...six were carried out in 1806...

...Every literary movement begins with a fresh vision and is determined to depict reality with greater vividness than its predecessors managed...

...It is therefore curious that MacCarthy labels him homosexual, rather than bisexual...

...She was granted unprecedented access to papers owned by descendants of his publisher, John Murray, and has unearthed new details, but Byron's romances with young men have long been known...

...Baudelaire, on the other hand, reacted to the rebuilding of Paris by recalling other great cities of history and myth that fancied themselves at their peak precisely when destruction was looming...

...She attributes this trend to the increased militarism of a country at war with Napoleonic France...

...His masterpiece, after all, retells the story of the archetypal libertine, Don Juan, and the ethos of Romanticism involved breaking social taboos...

...Still moie amazing, his prolific output coincided with a wildly active private and public life...

...Written in the master's style, that poem revived the vision of him as a Modernist hero...

...Consequently, his polymorphous eroticism has been noted and researched, atleast by the psychoanalytic community, for nearly eight decades...

...MacCarthy shows that many of Byron's friends would today be considered gay (sexual orientation, of course, was not a recognized concept then...

...The poet traveled widely as a young man, and in particular bragged of affairs with boys in Greece and Albania...

...It is no coincidence that the poet's sexual exploits have been a focal point for virtually everyone writing about him...

...In "Le Cygne" Baudelaire also uses pastiche and what the critic aptly terms "bric-a-brac" (bits and pieces of allusions to poems like The Aeneid and Le Chanson de Roland), adding a cast of thousands to his solitary imagination when he desires a crowd...

...We can relate his growing angst during his Cambridge years," MacCarthy writes, "to his awareness of a hardening of public attitudes toward homosexuality in England as a whole...

...Charles Baudelaire (1821 -67) declared he was no better than anyone else: "Hypocrite reader, my likeness, my brother," he wrote in Les Fleurs du Mal, accusing his audience and himself...

...She does some justice to Don Juan, but generally appears to lack a critical vocabulary for verse...

...Monumentally indiscreet, he reported his intimacies to friends (and probably boasted of things he had not done as well...

...The last full-scale study of him was Leslie Marchand's 1957 three-volume Byron: A Biography...

...Marchand found the theory that Byron had fathered one of Augusta's daughters unlikely, yet was able to cite correspondence demonstrating the existence of some kind of sexual relationship...

...MacCarthy contends that what most horrified Byron's contemporaries was his practicing sodomy, a capital offense in the England of his day...

...Just as the Romantic antihero claimed titanic passions, his Modernist counterpart admitted to ennui, spleen, disgust, and other petty feelings...

...Understandable as MacCarthy's focus may be, her book's biggest weakness is its shortchanging the poetry...

...Few conventional biographies, though, offer so clear a picture of personality and thought process as does Lloyd's critical study...

...Along with the famously associative sense of smell, he employed other stimuli to weave fragments of observations, quoted passages, dreams, and reminiscences into a rich tapestry, so that he might capture fleeting sensations of some passing moment...

...Think of the moment in The Pirates of Penzance when the pirates seize the maidens and threaten them with instant marriage, thanks to a doctor of divinity who resides in this vicinity...

...His outspoken admiration for Napoleon, even while his countrymen were dying in a war with the French Emperor, was no less controversial and baffling than a contemporary American leader's expression of approbation for Osama bin Laden would be...

...His campy side appealed strongly to Auden, always alert for signs of a homosexual subculture...

...The whole subject was shrouded in horrified innuendo and taboo...

...Although in recent years more attention has been paid to the poetry of his contemporaries, John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Byron's life continues to fascinate...

...He invariably was surprised when observers were adversely affected by his extreme tantrums...

...Molested as a child, first by his nurse (female) and then by a neighbor (male), Byron in tum seduced schoolmates while at Harrow...

...Evidence suggests that he was increasingly drawn to women as he aged, and that the majority of his serious relationships, erotic and otherwise, were with women, despite an occasional tendresse for pages...

...As a writer," Lloyd points out, he "is both the one who reveals the world as it is and the one who transforms and embellishes it...

...In TlieAeneid, when Aeneas encounteredHector's widow, banished from Troy, she was trying to recreate some of its landmarks to assuage her mourning...

...Byron's desire to shock made his personality hard to interpret...

...Richard Holmes' Shellev: The Pursuit contained a portrait of Byron-a secondary character in Holmes' scheme-more vivid and sympathetic than MacCarthy manages in almost 700 pages...

...Its population had doubled between 1800 and 1850...

...His oeuvre might well have taken another poet 40 or 50 years to produce...

...Numerous early 19th-century authors examined incest in their fiction...

...She does not recapitulate his life, except to illustrate something in the verse...

...Decades earlier, Rossetti suggested the transgressor of social mores and lover of radicalism might have morphed over time into a crotchety old Tory...

...MacCarthy quotes letters revealing he was intermittently bulimic in an effort to keep his weight down...

...Her taste for Gilbert and Sullivan leads her to quote Koko's "Little List" and explain Baudelaire's pleasure in the sound of poetry: "With its echoes and its ability to suggest words not included in the poem, rhyme acts not just as a source of musicality but also as a means of memory, or a suggestion of the constant return of what a mind may be trying to suppress...

...He died at 36, an age when many writers are just hitting their stride...

...Lloyd analyzes "Le Cygne," whose titular swan, having escaped from a Paris menagerie, is seen not gracefully swimming or flying but clumsily waddling: A Swan broken out of its cage, Palmate feet rasping the dry pavement, On the ruts of the road dragging its white feathers...

...Later descriptions of those encounters outraged his sister and wife...

...The rate of public hangings of convicted sodomists increased...

...In his 1957 treatment, Marchand made his subject's writings come alive for those schooled in the values of New Criticism and unaccustomed to Romanticism...

...He claimed they had both been happy, with no previous marital strife...

...If you want to know all about his ancestors and childhood or who slept with whom, this is not your book...

...But some maintained that the embittered woman's tale was an attempt to ruin her husband and make sure he could not get custody of their daughter, Ada...

...On Poetry Romantic and Modern Antiheroes By Phoebe Pettingell George Gordon Noel Byron (1788-1824), who inherited his title of Lord, is often considered the epitome of the Romantic antihero, a figure many critics believe he helped to invent...

...From the vantage point of the 21 st century, though, Byron and Baudelaire may have more in common as innovators than their respective Romantic antihero and Modernist postures promise...

...Writing in English for an audience that may not be fluent in the conventions of French poetry, Lloyd loves to discuss the best way to translate or find parallels for certain Gallic cultural references...

...His swashbuckling escapades read like a novel-a Gothic one, filled with transgressive sex, physical deformity, emotional excesses, adventures in many lands, and radical politics climaxed by an early death on foreign soil...

...From 1805 onward," she notes...

...Even her account of Byron's extraliterary life is frequently fuzzy The fascinating figures who surrounded himfrom crazy Lady Caroline Lamb to the Shelleys and Leigh Hunt-seem insipid in her pages...

...The predominant religion of the 19th century may have been the cult of progress...

...He could be a generous friend, emotionally and financially, yet at the same time spread malicious gossip about the very people he seemed to value-as he did with the Shelleys...

...Quoting Théophile Gautier, Lloyd notes how many writers of the time spoke "in rapturous tones of printing, steam, electricity, all those marvelous means of almost instantaneous communication...

...Near a waterless watercourse the beast, beak agape, Nervously bathed its wings in the dust...

...Byron himself, however, was attracted to both men and women...

...After flaunting his relationship with prostitutes and with his sister, on top of other scandalous treatment of his wife, he was stunned when she asked for a separation...

...It is as if he foresaw something equivalent to the Disneyfication of New York's Times Square or the rise of the generic glass hotels and offices that dominate the view of the French capital for foreign tourists in Jacques Tati's film, Traffic...

...As for England's sodomy laws, it is difficult to tell whether he really dreaded them or actually enjoyed violating them from the relative safety of his noble rank...

...The comparable "revelation" in MacCarthy's book is that Byron was homosexual...

...The pathetic creature reminds the poet of Virgil's Andromache...

...Absent such talent, you can always pick up the poems and do that for yourself...

...The ambitious plans of Napoleon I, inspired in large measure by the architecture of imperial Rome, had left their mark on the city's shape and on its monuments...

...But those were speculations aroused by what we then understood about Byron...

...In Baudelaire's World (Cornell, 288 pp., $35.00), Rosemary Lloyd calls him the man who "grabs the Goddess of poetry by the hair to pull her abruptly into the modern world...

...Along the way, however, Baudelaire began to believe Romantics were escapists who ignored or glamorized a sordid present and were too much in love with a past that seemed heroic because it was distant...

...What would he have become had he lived longer...

...Baudelaire started out following the pattern Byron had set for an antihero-in-training...

...The great mid-Victorian edition of Byron's works, edited by William Michael Rossetti, discussed the incest charge at length without coming to a definitive conclusion about its truth...

...A new century deserves a more coherent and judicious portrait of him than MacCarthy has provided...

...The reader is pretty much served plot summaries of Byron's longer pieces, plus bald assertions of putative "greatness...

...Indeed, ambivalence became the hallmark of the Romantic temperament largely because he depicted it so effectively in his poetry...

...The story surfaced back in the 19th century, when the poet's estranged wife aired her suspicions to Harriet Beecher Stowe...

...At Cambridge he met one of the grand passions of his life-a 15 -year-old chorister named John Edleston whose death occasioned the "Thyrza" poems, initially thought to be about a female...

...Here all the 'nity' rhymes (opporttraYy, impunity, etc...

...Tracing the plaintive music of Baudelaire's train of thought throughout the work, Lloyd demonstrates how he fashioned a "palimpsest of memory" that captured impressions of a world subject to rapid alterations: "By the 1850s Paris had undergone immense changes in both physical and social structure...

...Whereas the Enlightenment exalted the man of will, Byron helped elevate the man of feeling-whose emotions need not be admirable so long as they are intense...

...Lloyd's objective is to scrutinize the culture and influences that shaped the French poet...

...Byron was able to accomplish a great deal in his short existence...

...In any case, a creative literary critic like Rosemary Lloyd can make bygone poets relevant to the predicaments of our own times...

...A similar idea motivates the American artist Thomas Cole's series of paintings, The Course of Empire (1836), where the flowering of civilization already carries the seeds of decadence and destruction...

...Watching buildings and parks in a state of flux (hence the homeless swan from a defunct zoo), Baudelaire decided to become a student of Paris' even more perishable aspects: the lives of cafés and bar and the dirty, dim streets of the mid-19thcentury city...

...Traveling to exotic places, experimenting with hashish and opiates, he passed up a relatively safe career as a lawyer and chose to be an impecunious writer (a prospect the titled Byron never had to face...

...Marchand's thorough work described his subject's liaisons as frankly as the buttoned-up times would allow, and his candor on the Augusta issue in particular broke new ground...

...But he also admired the witty, critically astute discussions of everything under the sun found in Byron's major verses...

...Now Fiona MacCarthy, who has given us portraits of artists Eric Gill and William Morris, tries to portray this dramatic character for 21 st-century sensibilities in Byron: Life and Legend (Farrar Straus Giroux, 688 pp., $35.00...

...All that can be said for certain is that Byron was conflicted and neurotic...

...Byron apparently explored it in reality by sleeping with his half sister, Augusta Leigh...

...help to evoke the word that cannot be spoken but is inextricable from the theme: 'virginity.'" She illustrates Baudelaire's wordplay with such charming examples as his trick of rhyming astres (stars) with désastres (disasters) in "Le Voyage," to remind the reader that shipwrecks and similar catastrophes were long thought to be caused by inauspicious conjunctions in the heavens...

...MacCarthy does not share this skill...

...More suspected offenders were put to the pillory...

...The approach is quite inventive, and we learn about her in the process...