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COPYRIGHT 2003 Boston University
Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Pp. 251. $42.50.
The object and method of Jeffery Vail's study are perfectly captured in and by his somewhat old-fashioned title, and it delivers exactly what it promises. Insofar as it is a self-consciously revisionary exercise, it is revisionary only in the sense that it asks us to look more closely at the wealth of material written by and about Byron and Moore in the first half of the nineteenth century and to reconsider the precise nature and timing of their work in the light of the other's and of their own convictions about each other. Insofar as it is revisionary, moreover, it is also reactionary or restorative, time and again suggesting that Byron's and Moore's contemporaries had a sense of their literary relatedness and ideological allegiance that was at once more acute and more accurate than our own.
The structure is a fairly comfortable compromise between the generic and the chronological, so that while the first chapter--on Byron's and Moore's "Early Lyrics"--concentrates on the years from 1801 until they became friends and "Whig poets" (40) in the winter of 1811-12, the second on their "Political Verse and Satires" ranges over their whole careers. This means that Vail's very brief but suggestive discussion of the influence of Moore on the loosening up process that Byron went through to enable him to write Don Juan comes before his more lengthy discussions of both their songs (chapter 3) and of...
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