Sarah's Reviews > Selected Poems of Lord Byron

My review of Childe Harold is here!

My reivew of Don Juan is here!

I have to admit that Byron took me a really, really long time to finish. I am not sure if I can put my finger on why that is, but he's taken much longer to read than other poets, even others from his very own time period. Long story short, I find his poetry to be a little harder to follow- to compare to Keats, who is my favorite poet, I can say this: Keats has a flow to his poetry that I can't find in Byron's poetry, and while I can't say that I don't enjoy Byron, I don't enjoy it as much as Keats. I am afraid that I might be a bit more fixated on this fact than I should be, but hey, that's the way it is...

I thoroughly enjoy the longer works of Byron, excluding the plays and early satires. "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" is a wonderful work, and probably the most masterful work that Byron ever put out there. The regret that I have is that there's something in that work that made me think "Oh, this must mean that his other poems are going to be like this! Great!" I think I ran into a little fallacy there- like I mentioned before, the satires and plays that take up so much space in this collection tend to be a bit more boring that I'd like them to be, chock-full of allusions that seem to be a go-to for many poets as well as talking about many issues that I cannot relate to myself. I regret not finding more enjoyment in reading this poetry, but I cannot change what I know to be true: Byron fell a bit flat for me, perhaps warranting a revisit and reevaluation in the future.