Teetering on the razor’s edge between artistic liberation and personal destruction, George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788 – 1824) was a writer of great power whose life was characterized by epic excess. Byron was intimate with physical pain — the result of a deformed foot — and suffered a traumatic childhood, which seem to have created in him a powerful urge to both free the spirit through strong and masculine poetry and to court personal disaster with scandalous behaviour, including legendary affairs with men, married women and even his own sister.
Byron is a cornerstone of the romantic canon. He is the model for the Byronic hero, which refers to an idealized but flawed character. His impatience with what he called “sweating poesy” — overworked and overwritten verse — is a hallmark of romantic poetry.
Lord Byron’s Notes Re-Created On a Journal Cover
The autographed page featured on this journal cover is an excerpt from Byron’s most famous work, Don Juan.
Here’s what the Morgan Library & Museum have to say about the page:
“Byron’s manuscript of Don Juan reveals a fluid hand, the author often working with minimal revision to achieve a swift, conversational pace despite the complexity of his chosen rhyme scheme, ottava rima. Shortly after composing the first canto, page of which is shown here, Byron added several dozen stanzas to the poem. He then recopied some of the new stanzas crosswise, in a neat and regular hand, directly over the first draft. ‘The bore of copying it out is intolerable,’ he told a friend after completing the first canto, ‘and if I had an amanuensis he would be of no use, as my writing is so difficult to decipher.'”
This design is available in two sizes: Ultra and Mini. For more details of these books, go to the products page here.
Paperblanks’ Embellished Manuscripts Collection
To inspire the writer, these unique writing journals portray the work of some of the greatest writers, thinkers and artists of all time. These reproductions of excerpts from original manuscripts, letters, scores and drawings provide a glimpse into the creative process of figures such as William Shakespeare, Sigmund Freud and Vincent van Gogh.
To see the full range of artists and reproduced manuscripts go here.
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