ABSTRACT
Lord Byron opted for ‘disjointed fragments’ of narrative and his self-acknowledged model for the fragmentation is Samuel Rogers’s 1812 poem, The Voyage of Columbus. In his Preface, Rogers makes claims for his fragmented narrative that are, in at least one important respect, similar to James Beattie’s claims, which Byron quotes in the Preface to Childe Harold I and II, for writing that utilizes the Spenserian stanza. The idea of a poem in the form of the disjointed, fragmented, often lyrical remains of a larger poem offered Byron a freedom akin to that offered by the Spenserian stanza. It gave him a way of telling a story that brought with it a considerable degree of freedom from the obligations imposed by a straightforward narrative. Before Byron began writing The Giaour, then, he was, firstly, looking to a narrative structure to sustain and prolong his lyric invention by offering a series of episodes to be lyricized.
