Byron, George Gordon Noel, 6th Baron Byron
(1788-1824)

Byron, George Gordon Noel, 6th Baron Byron (1788-1824), known as Lord Byron, English poet, who was one of the most important and versatile writers of the Romantic movement.

Early Development Byron was born on January 22, 1788, the son of Captain John ("Mad Jack") Byron and Catherine Gordon, a Scottish heiress whose fortune he had squandered. Jack Byron died in France in 1791, and the young Byron was brought up in Aberdeen by his temperamental mother and a Calvinist nurse, who, according to Byron, initiated him sexually when he was nine years old. Having been born with a club foot, Byron was forced to undergo painful and unsuccessful medical treatments throughout his childhood. Inheriting the title of Baron Byron in 1798 from his great-uncle, Byron moved with his mother to Newstead Abbey, his ancestral estate, and was educated at Harrow School and-intermittently-at Trinity College, Cambridge University. Here he was notorious for loose living and radicalism, and was described by a tutor as "a young man of tumultuous passions". He left, without a degree and deeply in debt, in 1807 to pursue an extravagant lifestyle in London. Byron's collection of lyrics, Hours of Idleness, published the same year, was harshly attacked in the Edinburgh Review, prompting Byron's lively satirical response, "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers" (1809). Written in heroic couplets, this poem shows the influence of Alexander Pope, whom Byron admired greatly. In 1817 he declared his astonishment at: "the ineffable distance in point of sense-harmony-effect-and even Imagination Passion-and Invention-between the little Queen Anne's Man [Pope]-and us of the lower Empire … ".

Fame
In 1812 the publication of Cantos I and II of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage made Byron famous. A rambling narrative in Spenserian stanzas, the poem had been written while travelling across Europe to Greece, where Byron had swum the Hellespont (like Leander in Greek mythology) and engaged in a series of romantic adventures. The melancholy hero of Childe Harold, brooding on his own estrangement, captured the imagination of the English public:

And now I'm in the world alone
Upon the wide, wide sea;
But why should I for others groan,
When none will sigh for me?


Handsome and personally magnetic, Byron was fêted by London society and he circulated in every fashionable set. In 1813 he wrote that "The great object of life is Sensation-to feel that we exist-even though in pain-it is this 'craving void' which drives us to Gaming-to Battle-to Travel … ". Byron also had a series of scandalous love affairs, including one with Lady Caroline Lamb, who famously described him as "mad, bad and dangerous to know", and later fictionalized him in her novel Glenarvon.
With the wildly successful publications-Byron was, in modern terminology, a best-seller-of the Eastern tales, The Bride of Abydos and The Giaour in 1813, and The Corsair and Lara in 1814, the myth of the Byronic hero intensified. Byron wrote of his poetry, "it is the lava of the imagination, whose eruption prevents an earthquake", and his rapid style of composition (The Bride of Abydos was written in four days) is reflected in the energy and fluency of his verse. In 1815 the Hebrew Melodies were published, with music. As these lines from "She Walks in Beauty" suggest, Byron's lyrical power itself has a musical quality, derived from his technical confidence:

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes.


In 1815 Byron married the heiress and keen mathematician Annabella Milbanke, whom he had described in earlier letters as "the Princess of Parallelograms", writing: "I should like her more if she were less perfect." The marriage ended after a year, Annabella leaving him after the birth of their daughter, probably because of suspicions of his sexual relationship with his half-sister, Augusta, to whom he was deeply attached. It is likely that Byron did in fact father one of Augusta's children.
Exile from England
Under a cloud of scandal, and accused of "every monstrous vice", Byron left England (the "tight little Island", as he described it) for ever in 1816, travelling first to Switzerland, where he met Percy Shelley and Mary Shelley. Claire Clairmont, the half-sister of Mary Shelley, followed Byron and later gave birth to his daughter. In Switzerland, Byron wrote The Prisoner of Chillon; two acts of a play, Manfred; and Canto III of Childe Harold. Canto III, according to the Edinburgh Review, showed "the same stern and lofty disdain of all mankind" as Byron's earlier work, "but mixed … with deeper and more matured reflections, and a more intense sensibility to all that is grand and lovely in the external world". Personal meditation is interwoven with reflections on world events and figures such as Napoleon and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Byron called Canto III his "favourite", writing: "I was half mad during the time of its composition, between metaphysics, mountains, lakes, love unextinguishable, thoughts unutterable, and the nightmare of my own delinquencies."
Italy
Byron travelled to Italy, and entered a phase of frantic sexual promiscuity in Venice. Eventually, he settled into an uneasy harmony as the cavaliere servente (lover) of Teresa Guiccioli, the young wife of an elderly Italian count. In Beppo (1818), Byron used ottava rima, a galloping verse form well suited to him, to tell a light-hearted, bawdy story of Italian social mores, dotted with comparisons to English society and a certain amount of self-mockery:

But I am but a nameless sort of person
(A broken Dandy lately on my travels),
And take for rhyme, to hook my rambling verse on,
The first that Walker's Lexicon unravels,
And when I can't find that, I put a worse on,
Not caring as I ought for critics' cavils.


Beppo gracefully and wittily turns the Byronic myth back on itself, and Byron wrote of it: "It will at any rate show … that I can write cheerfully." Byron adopted ottava rima again in Don Juan, a brilliant mock epic, the first two cantos of which were published anonymously in 1819. Blackwood's magazine denounced Don Juan as "a filthy and impious poem". To the suggestion of his publisher, John Murray, that it should be edited, Byron had replied, "I will have none of your damned cutting and slashing", and "Do you suppose I could have any intentions but to giggle and make giggle?".
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe expressed admiration for Don Juan, and Byron later dedicated his poem "Werner" to the German poet. In 1820 Byron continued with Cantos III and IV of Don Juan and became embroiled in the Italian patriotic movement. Teresa Guiccioli left her husband in 1821, and Byron moved with her from Ravenna to Pisa, producing a string of verse dramas that year, including Sardanapalus and Cain, which were disappointingly received and have rarely been performed.
In 1821 the Poet Laureate, Robert Southey, made a veiled attack on Byron in the preface to his poem "A Vision of Judgement". Byron retaliated with "The Vision of Judgement" (1822), a fierce and cruel satire. Too controversial to be published by John Murray, this poem was printed in the first edition of The Liberal, the journal that Byron produced in collaboration with Percy Shelley and Leigh Hunt.
Greek Independence
Three issues of The Liberal were produced, before the death of Shelley and a quarrel with Hunt put an end to the venture. Byron became impatient for action, and on hearing of the Greek War of Independence against the Turks, he set sail for Cephalonia in July 1823. By January 1824, after various mishaps, he had joined the Greek insurgents at Missolonghi, where he formed the "Byron Brigade" and poured energy and financial support into the cause, although dismayed at the internal divisions among the Greek forces. That month, depressed by an unrequited passion for a Greek boy, and feeling his age, he wrote his final lyric, "On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year":

If thou regret'st thy youth, why live?
The land of honourable death
Is here:-up to the field, and give
Away thy breath!


Byron contracted a fever, was bled repeatedly by his doctors, and died at Missolonghi on April 19, 1824. His body was taken to England, denied burial at Westminster Abbey, and finally entombed in the ancestral vault at Newstead. Byron's memoirs were destroyed after his death by John Murrray.
Critical Reception
During his lifetime, Byron's popularity was immense and he was considered by many, including Shelley, to have produced some of the greatest poetry of his age. His role in the Romantic movement-which influenced European and American thought, art, and politics well into the late 19th century-was central, although, ironically, he judged himself and contemporaries such as William Wordsworth and Robert Southey to be following "a wrong revolutionary poetical system", holding the Neo-Classicist Pope in higher esteem. More than anyone, Byron came to typify the idea of the Romantic hero, rejecting convention and tyranny, and striving for individual liberty.
While the sheer lyrical beauty of Byron's best work, his technical inventiveness with versification, and his wit have ensured his continued critical importance, Byron's significance is often seen to reside in his life rather than in his work. Bertrand Russell places him among the major forces for change in the 19th century in A History of Western Philosophy (1945), arguing that "[L]ike many other prominent men he was more important as a myth than as he really was", and that his resonance was greatest outside England: "Abroad, his way of feeling and his outlook on life were transmitted and developed and transmuted until they became so wide-spread as to be factors in great events."

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