In his
later poems, such as _Beppo_, 1818, and _Don Juan_, 1819-1823, he passed
into his second manner, a mocking cynicism gaining ground upon the
somewhat stagey gloom of his early poetry--Mephistophiles gradually
elbowing out Satan. _Don Juan_, though morally the worst, is
intellectually the most vital and representative of Byron's poems. It
takes up into itself most fully the life of the time; exhibits most
thoroughly the characteristic alternations of Byron's moods and the
prodigal resources of wit, passion, and understanding, which--rather
than imagination--were his prominent qualities as a poet. The hero, a
graceless, amorous stripling, goes wandering from Spain to the Greek
islands and Constantinople, thence to St. Petersburg, and finally to
England. Every-where his seductions are successful, and Byron uses him
as a means of exposing the weakness of the human heart and the
rottenness of society in all countries. In 1823, breaking away from his
life of selfish indulgence in Italy, Byron threw himself into the cause
of Grecian liberty, which he had sung so gloriously in the _Isles of
Greece_. He died at Missolonghi, in the following year, of a fever
contracted by exposure and overwork.
Byron was a great poet but not a great literary artist.
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