Excerpt from Poems

Byron is to be judged by the whole mountainous mass of his work, and not by any fragment of coloured or glittering spar which one"s pick may have extricated from the precipitous hill-side. His work is a kind of natural formation, high enough to climb, and wide enough to walk on. There is hard climbing and heavy walking, but, once there, the air braces and the view is wide.

In making a selection from this large and uneven mass of poetry, it is difficult to do justice to a writer who was almost never a really good writer of verse, except in a form of what he rightly defined as "nondescript and ever-varying rhyme." The serio-comic ottava rima of "Don Juan" and "The Vision of Judgment" is the only metre which Byron ever completely mastered; and it is only in those unique poems, in which Goethe detected, for the first time in modern poetry, a "classically elegant comic style," that Byron is wholly able to express the new quality which he brought into English literature in a wholly personal, or at all satisfying, way.

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