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Following up on this post:
Actually, The Sea-King is not very Byronic at all -- it's a reincarnation fantasy that trundles along in Walter Scott's mode. Except, of course, for the Norse myth trappings, which are both surprisingly extensive and unsurprisingly all surface. It also looks ahead to pulp adventure stories in the Haggard and Burroughs vein, and its largest failure mode, an inability to deal with women in any way realistically, squarely matches that genre's. I am not at all surprised to learn that the author, a minor Spasmodic poet named J. Stanyan Bigg, was 20 when he published it.
If you're interested in rhyming pulp adventure, I commend it to your attention.
OTOH, the main failure mode of The Maiden of Moscow is applying Byronic mannerisms not to passion but to sentiment, and in particular sentimentality. If you can make it past the third canto, your stomach is stronger than mine -- I had to cleanse my palate with some Roman gods wangsting in dogtrot Elizabethan fourteeners.
(Subject line by G.K. Chesterton, natch.)
ETA: Apparently, The Maiden of Moscow has (one of?) the first known usages "outer space." Who knew?
---L.
Actually, The Sea-King is not very Byronic at all -- it's a reincarnation fantasy that trundles along in Walter Scott's mode. Except, of course, for the Norse myth trappings, which are both surprisingly extensive and unsurprisingly all surface. It also looks ahead to pulp adventure stories in the Haggard and Burroughs vein, and its largest failure mode, an inability to deal with women in any way realistically, squarely matches that genre's. I am not at all surprised to learn that the author, a minor Spasmodic poet named J. Stanyan Bigg, was 20 when he published it.
If you're interested in rhyming pulp adventure, I commend it to your attention.
OTOH, the main failure mode of The Maiden of Moscow is applying Byronic mannerisms not to passion but to sentiment, and in particular sentimentality. If you can make it past the third canto, your stomach is stronger than mine -- I had to cleanse my palate with some Roman gods wangsting in dogtrot Elizabethan fourteeners.
(Subject line by G.K. Chesterton, natch.)
ETA: Apparently, The Maiden of Moscow has (one of?) the first known usages "outer space." Who knew?
---L.