From ancient to modern: Byron, Shelley, and the idea of Greece

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    Abstract

    Byron’s Childe Harold ( 1812) popularized a view of Greece as not merely a site of classical splendour but of a downtrodden present and a problematic future. This new focus for interest in Greece quickly found its place in the emerging, and closely interlinked, ideologies of Romanticism in the arts and liberalism and nationalism in politics. Radical liberals, such as the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, admired classical Athens as a pioneer of a liberal political constitution, as well as for its aesthetic and philosophical achievements. Byron, who had been lukewarm about the prospects for Greek independence in 1812, belatedly discovered in the Greek Revolution of 1821 an outlet whereby the liberal/nationalist politics of his poetry could be transformed into political action.

    1.2 A careful reconsideration of Byron’s writings and actions from his first Grand Tour ( 1809–1811) to his death at Missolonghi in April 1824 suggests that his decision to commit himself to the cause of Greek freedom was the culmination of a poetic and ideological development that had consistently sought to break through the limiting barrier of words (a perennial dilemma for Romantic artists) so as to change the course of things in the world of real politics and action. “Words are things,” Byron wrote in a number of different contexts over the last ten years of his life.

    1.3 His final commitment seems to have been consciously and deliberately to give up the vocation of a poet (“words”), when in June 1823 he committed himself to going to Greece to take part in the Revolution (“things”). Thereafter, Byron’s letters, and the absence of any significant poetry, reveal an overwhelming dedication to what he called the “Cause,” and a remarkably clear-sighted determination that the future for a reborn Greece must lie in a liberally constituted nation-state. In this way, Byron’s last months in Greece, and his political contribution to the outcome of the Revolution, can be seen as the culmination of a defining quest for European Romanticism, that lies at the root of Modernity as it has come to be understood since: to transform words into things, ideals into action. The success of this quest is demonstrated by the fact that as early as 1830, three decades before Italy and Germany, “modern” Greece came to be recognized as the first of the newly constituted nation-states of Europe—thus establishing a precedent which continues to prevail throughout the continent, and indeed much of the world, today.
    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)1-22
    Number of pages22
    JournalThe Athens Dialogues
    Volume1
    Publication statusPublished - 2010

    Keywords

    • Romanticism
    • Greece

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