The Works of Lord Byron. Vol. 4

This fourth volume of poetry in Ernest Hartley Coleridge's edition, published in 1901, gathers work Lord Byron wrote abroad in Switzerland and Italy between 1816 and 1823. It opens with The Prisoner of Chillon and the short poems of the summer of 1816, among them Darkness, Prometheus and the Stanzas to Augusta, then moves to Manfred, The Lament of Tasso, Beppo, Mazeppa, The Prophecy of Dante and the Venetian tragedy Marino Faliero.

Later pages bring The Vision of Judgment, the Monody on Sheridan spoken at Drury Lane Theatre, a line-for-line translation in terza rima of the Francesca of Rimini episode from Dante, the first canto of Pulci's Morgante Maggiore in English, and occasional pieces from 1816 to 1823, five of them printed in this edition for the first time.

Coleridge's introductions and copious footnotes trace manuscript variants, Byron's letters and the books he drew on, so the volume serves students as well as readers who simply want the poems. As the editor points out, the major poems here hardly resemble one another, and together they show the range of Byron's maturity, from the dramatic poem Manfred to the Venetian tale Beppo.