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1. Jean Hall's "The Evolution of the Surface Self: Byron's Poetic Career" on the making of identity in The Prelude and Childe Harold(Don Juan)
And so Don Juan becomes the great Romantic poem of surface, The Prelude is the great Romantic poem of depth. The Prelude is the autobiography of a man who examines his past in search of an inner self latent there and needs to be brought into present awareness. Thought and speech are vital to Wordsworth's procedure, for he is reflecting himself, examining the apparently incomplete events of his past to out the fullness of their meaning, the manner in which these parts contributed to the development of his whole self. In making his he both recounts and extends his own self-development; the inwardness initiated by his childhood experiences is continued and expanded ongoing poetic interpretations. But while Wordsworth's procedure creates an immense field of inner activity, it also does pose problems. He must see all the events of his life through the focus of his self-development, a focus that validates not only the significance of his own the way in which all parts lead to the whole, all episodes partake infinity, all things of the world rest in God. Therefore, to affirm harmony of the world he also needs to assert the success of his self-development. In contrast, Byron's poem of surface denies all claims to unity and focus. The author of Don Juan gives up the attempt to make complete sense of his experience. His is a poem of middle age, a stream of words that begins to flow when "I / Have spent my life, both interest and principal, / And deem not, what I deem'd, my soul invincible" (I, 213). He writes because he is losing the physical capacity to act, and he believes that the next best thing to sensuous experience is the imagination of it. So Byron splits his self between the mindless but cheerful physicality of the young Juan, who learns nothing from his experiences and never grows up, and the incessant verbal flow of the poem's middle-aged narrator, who exists to escape Wordsworthian interpretation-to avoid looking into himself by constantly searching for new external stimuli, new diversions. Wordsworth and Byron become contraries: where Wordsworth's poem is halted by his middle age, Byron's begins there. Wordsworth's poetry of spontaneous overflow is inhibited and finally cut off by his immense need to have the spontaneous reveal design, to have utterance in the present embody the significance of the entire past life. But it is Byron who truly practices poetry as spontaneous overflow: "I write what's uppermost, without delay," and the words become "a straw, borne on by human breath," a self-created but meaningless play- thing that evokes the enthusiasm to produce an additional rush of words (xiv, 7-8). The openness, the inconsistency of Don Juan allow it to become endless. As long as Byron's life continues, his poem also is free to proceed. As an alternative to the focus of the organic poem, he offers the delights of extension--the indefinitely prolonged unfurling of new surfaces, new stimuli(pp.146-47).
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