De Rada, Eliot and Byron

Moikom Zeqo

When talking about Romanticism, the whole constellation of names moves, spreads, but also ends at one point, the name of Byron (Lord Byron). Byron is not only a hero of Romanticism, but in many ways a martyr of Romanticism. Byron has within himself two images: that of the explosive and rebellious poet, the host who opens an era and that of the concrete man, of the historical character who has the exploits and the terrible contradictions inside the soul, a nomadic life, where the title of lord, luxury, adventures sexual, pride and shame come to an end in the final act of his untimely death in the name of the freedom of the Greek people.

This is Byron redrawn in history, in what is the history of art, but also in the political and social plane. Byron has influenced a large number of poets of various European peoples as an imitative icon and unparalleled popularity. Even for Albanians, Bajroni is a carved name of memory, inspiration and gratitude.

In his aesthetic notes, Jeronim De Rada also mentions Byron. Unlike his fellow poets of the time, De Rada is extremely skeptical of Byron. His skepticism has an artistic charm. De Rada writes that Byron's poem "The Corsair" cannot leave a deep impression, he thinks that Byron's poetics reminds him of the verses of Lucan, the grandson of the philosopher Seneca, whom the Roman emperor Nero killed at the age of 28 because of Lucan's participation in a political conspiracy. De Rada's remark related to a parallelism between Byron and Lucan is thought-provoking, even surprising. Meanwhile, it should not be forgotten that Byron is related to De Rada in some points, he even mentions the same names of places that De Rada also wrote about. In Child Harold's Canto II, lines 407-415, Byron writes:

"From the gloomy Albanian death, Harold
Passed to the navel of Illyria,
For very majestic plateaus and mountains
I brought it that History does not remember
In the mentioned Attica you rarely see
Such beautiful valleys: there is no Tempia
The ornament you can find there; Dear Parnassus,
Although classic hallowed ground
It cannot be compared to the secrets that this coast hides"

Look what Byron is up to! He compares the sanctified beauty spots of Greece with the beauty of the Albanian coast, valleys and mountains of Albania. And it raises them higher, not only in appreciation, but also in imagination. Byron mentions a place called Tempe. From the beginning of "Milosao", De Rada talks about Anacreon's dove that comes to him precisely from Tempe. At this point, Byron is more transcendent, even more concrete because of the vivid experiences of the trip and the sincerity of his feelings, where he describes South Albania. De Rada has never been to Tempe. However, his poetic creativity has a hint not so much of the concrete toponym Tempe, but of the exalted mythology of the name of Tempe. De Rada has probably read "Child Harold". But he does not mention it in his notes. I mention the poem of the Corsair, a poem that, due to its exotic eastern narration, in some ways recalls De Rada's own historical and imagined poems. De Rada's mind could be torn apart by this. De Rada could even claim Byron as his model. but aesthetically De Rada, apart from the narrative character that creates a parallel with Byron, from a conceptual point of view is not at all like Byron. I noticed this variability early on, but I did not articulate it.

Only recently, looking through a book "Selected Essays" published by Haber and Faber Limited, 1932, written by Thomas Eliot (1888-1966) I was again surprised to read one of his essays on Byron. Eliot, as one of the greatest poets of poetic modernity, of the XNUMXth century, reached a high quota even as a great critic. He speaks of Byron's poetry coolly, but sometimes his pen is like a surgical instrument. Eliot operates with genuine aesthetic ideas and makes an assessment where skepticism is conspicuous. He says that Byron's poetry has a line of diabolism in all the literary characters he created, although this diabolism is different from that which gave romantic agony in Catholic countries. Eliot thinks that Byron's diabolicalism derives from a comfortable compromise between Christianity and paganism that in English expression was achieved in England in a form of syncretism, derived from a religious background of a people steeped in Calvinist theology. Byron's diabolism, if it really deserves the name, is of a mixed type. To an extent, he had Shell's Promethean attitude.

The romantic passion for freedom, and this passion inspired his political outbursts, combined with himself as a man of action to come and finish in the Greek adventure. Meanwhile his Promethean attitude merges into the satanic (Miltonian) attitude. Milton's romantic conception of Satan is semi-Promethean, and he also thinks of pride as a virtue. It would be difficult to say whether Byron was a proud man, or a man who wished to present himself as a proud man—the possibility of these two possibilities combined in the same individual does not make them any less similar in the abstract. Eliot also talks about the poem The Corsair by Byron, which he connects with other works, such as: "The Beast", "Manfred", "Cain" and especially "Don Juan", and notices that in their strange compositions of attitudes and beliefs, the most real and profound element is reflected in the form of a perversion, sourced from the Calvinist faith of Byron's maternal forefathers.

De Rada's Christian religious worldview in this very bud has been very sensitive. What Eliot says may have been thought by De Rada himself. If Byron's heroes do not despise the centuries-old Christian morality, even desecrate it even in the name of a new, different type of morality, this could not attract and enthuse De Rada. but I venture to add something else: De Rada disliked Byron for a reason connected with his literature. Those who can be called De Rada's heroes, or his characters, have a structure of formation quite different from Byron's. De Rada's human figures are always meditative, almost haunted in all senses, very sensitive to the natural environment and attentive to the motives of past history, but without great emotions, without sensational reactions, without pathos. These figures are never individualized and somehow have no autonomous life. They belong to an order of a similarity that constitutes the whole, just as the frames of a film are related to each other because of the film.

In De Rada, what is called true heroism is at work. Spectacular heroism is missing. They are not the heroes of apotheosis and sotirical acts. Death seems to come naturally, without much warning. The death of almost all the figures portrayed rather because of the names and costumes, or personal heraldry is not presented with the force of an earthquake or a disaster. There is an almost neutral stillness of the protagonist role of death in all narrative arrangements and structures. So it lacks the charm of supreme sacrifice even for a great ideal, such as freedom. So death is not a threat to De Rada. It is something natural, as are the elements of nature themselves: the sea, the earth, the winds, the trees, the movement of time, the variability of landscapes, etc.

So, De Rada's so-called heroes are not at all similar to the so-called Byronic heroes. If we look at two different times, what De Rada thought about Byron in the 19th century and what Eliot thought in the 20th century, it becomes clear that the aesthetic taste of the two poets who have never known each other has a certain approximation of implied, but not explainable. If Eliot, due to the modern achievements of world poetry, is more demanding and more critical of Byron, De Rada lacks this temporal priority (he lacks the 20th century), but his intuition has something penetrating and is to some extent connected with the modern taste of poetry that would come after De Rada's own death.