Article: Forster's 'The Road From Colonus.' (E.M. Forster)

Critics have argued that E. M. Forster, in his story "The Road from Colonus" (1911), uses a veiled calendrical reference to Lord Byron's death (on April 19) in the same way that he openly uses Sophocles' tragedy in the title: to underscore, by ironic contrast with the heroically cast deaths of Oedipus and Byron in Greece, the anticlimactic and pathetic survival of his protagonist, Mr. Lucas.(1) Although by itself the date of the poet's death may serve to evoke thematic irony, a closer look at Forster's story reveals two additional correspondences with details of Byron's last day, expanding the significance of this Byronic allusion to more parallel the Sophoclean play.

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