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Revolution and Romanticism
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A facsimile reprint in the Revolution & Romanticism series chosen and introduced by Jonathan Wordsworth ISBN 1 85477 128 0 174 x 110 mm 92 pages |
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR Gebir 1798 Gebir was published in the same year as Lyrical Ballads: it is hard to imagine a greater contrast. Both volumes were influential, but where Lyrical Ballads established for all time the poetry of everyday life, Gebir led, via Southey’s Thalaba, to that unremembered other side of Romanticism, the eastern tale, with its display of magic and oriental exotica. Gebir, an Iberian prince, invades Egypt but falls in love with its young queen Charoba, dying when he puts on a poisoned robe at his marriage-feast. The story involves a descent to the underworld, demons, witchcraft, a sea-nymph. Landor’s poem is not one of concealed meaning, nor is it one with a moral. Its pleasures are its resonant blank verse, the brilliance of its visual imagery, and the rapid transitions and drama of its narrative. £21 $40 ‘I often found Shelley reading Gebir. There was something in that poem that caught his fancy; he would read it aloud, or to himself sometimes, with a tiresome pertinacity. One morning, I went round to his room to tell him something of importance, but he would attend to nothing but Gebir. With a young impatience, I snatched the book out of the obstinate fellow’s hand, and threw it through the open window into the quadrangle.’ |
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