Description

St Martin's Press, 1960. Hardcover, 156 pp. No other printings listed. Good in acceptable dust jacket. Blue cloth covered boards with gold lettering on spine. Light bumping, scuffing and fading to spine. Binding tight. Pages lightly aged but otherwise unmarked. Dust jacket has several 1" or less chips and tears and light creasing along edges. Light to moderate overall scuffing and soiling to jacket as well. NOT price clipped. Now in an archival-quality (removable) Brodart Cover. NOT Ex-Library. NO remainder marks. Includes Bibliography, Quotations, Index. [From front jacket flap] Mr West is concerned with Byron's poetry, Don Juan in particular, not with his sex life - which is a change from the general tenor of recent writing about this poet. He sees Byron as a sensitive ('fearful of derision, he derided first') whose dominant theme in the romance poems was man trapped by circumstances, and who in Don Juan and the satires protected himself by turning everything to farce. Mr West writes with a wit and panache as rare among literary critics as it is stimulating. His knowledge is deep, and his range of reference wide - as when he compares aspects of Byron's poetry with the work of Chaucer, Baudelaire, Conrad, Camus and Hemingway. His analysis of the virtues and defects of rhymed and unrhymed verse is particularly valuable.