BOOKS

Notices and reviews of books, articles, plays and poetry dealing with homosexuality and the sex variant. Readers are invited to send in reviews or printed matter for review.

LORD BYRON'S MARRIAGE, G. Wilson Knight, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1957, 30s, 298 pp.

The great romantic poet, Lord Byron has long been an enigma. At the height of his tremendous fame, after a year of marriage, the 28-yearold poet was unexpectedly separated from his wife, who spent the rest of her life (long after his death at Missolonghi in 1824-fighting for Greek freedom) villifying and threatening him with "dark secrets." What were these unmentionable secrets? She hinted at incest between Byron and his half sister, to whom she herself was also passionately attached.

In this study, prominent critic G. Wilson Knight says the dark secret was homosexuality. Many writers have referred in passing to homosexual leanings on the poet's part, but have concentrated on romantic descriptions of Byron's "Don Juan" proclivities. Knight maintains that these heterosexual affairs were either grossly exaggerated, or were more chivalrous than sexual. He discusses Byron's "cleaned-up" early love poem written to school friends and his intense relationships with Edleston, Nicolo Giraud and Loukas, but he rests his case chiefly on the authenticity of two long poems, DON LEON and LEON to ANABELLA, ostensibly

one

written by Byron and circulated after his death. The latter poem defends Byron, by counter-attack, against Lady Byron's innuendos. The former, and longer, contains a detailed, often. raw and witty, homosexual confession and one of the most forceful defenses of homosexuality in the English language. Since they contain seeming references to homosexual scandals occuring after Byron's death, and also anti-clerical references (which Knight considers unlike Byron, though Byron used the same phrase in a letter to Hobhouse) Knight, like most authorities, assumes Byron could not have written the poems. (But texts of the poems vary widely. The references to later scandals could have been added later.) The poems are masterfully written in the manner of Pope's couplets with Byronic punning throughout. Knight argues that since they contain so much intimate and verifiable detail of Byron's life, they must have been written by someone who knew the poet well, shared the opinions expressed so forcefully, and was also a first-rate poet-all pointing, as Knight feels, to playwright George Coleman the younger, who had read Byron's suppressed memoirs (Byron had suggested the homosexual content of these memoirs in a letter to Isaac D'Israeli) and who was one of the evil companions Lady Byron objected to. Without the DON LEON,

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