"And freedom's fame finds wings on every wind"

Byron, Switzerland, and the poetics of freedom

Simon Bainbridge

pp. 136-151

in: Matthew A. Green, Piya Pal-Lapinski (eds), Byron and the politics of freedom and terror, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011

Abstract

Byron's stay in Switzerland from May to October 1816 has long been seen as a key period in his life and in his writing. A six-month sojourn during the poet's self-exiling journey from England to Italy, Byron's time in Switzerland saw the initial meeting with Percy Shelley and the rapid growth of their friendship, the engagement with the circle of Mme de Staël at Coppet, the literary tour of Lake Geneva, visiting the sites described in Rousseau's La Nouvelle Héloïse as well as the homes of the great Enlightenment thinkers, Voltaire and Gibbon, and the aesthetic tours of the mountain regions of Chamonix and the Bernese Oberland. During his residence, Byron composed much of the third canto of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, wrote many important works such as "Prometheus," The Prisoner of Chillon, the "Sonnet on Chillon," and "Darkness," and began the dramatic poem Manfred. However, unlike the attention given to Byron's time in Italy and Greece, and particularly to his involvement with the Carbonari and the Greek fight for independence from the Ottoman Empire, there has been very little critical consideration of the poet's engagement with either the contemporary politics of the Swiss Confederation or with the idea of Switzerland as the home of freedom. In this essay, I want to argue that Switzerland as a place, an idea, and a location for writing plays an important role in both the Byronic conception of freedom and its legacy.

Cited authors

Rousseau Jean-Jacques

Voltaire

Shelley Percy