So, we'll go no more a roving the latter part of it, and sitting up late o' nights--had knocked me up a little. But it is over--and it is now Lent, with all its abstinence and sacred music... Though I did not dissipate much upon the whole, yet I find 'the sword wearing out the scabbard,' though I have but just turned the corner of twenty nine." The poem seems to have been suggested in part by the refrain of a Scottish song known as "The Jolly Beggar." The Jolly Beggar was published in Herd's "Scots Songs" in 1776, 41 years before Byron's letter, and goes partially
The Personal Heresy “have concerned the critics far more than what the poem is really about, the true state of Milton’s mind when he wrote it.” As an example of what poetry is about, Lewis cites a poem, part of William Wordsworth's "Prelude". There is a personality in a poem, says Lewis, but we don’t know whose. We meet the poet “only in a strained and ambiguous sense” (9f.). Especially in drama we meet the poet's creation rather than the poet. In order to write poetry, the poet must use words to suggest what is public, common, impersonal, and objective. That is why