Lord Byron (1788-1824)

[Brit Boi Gee]

Lord Byron (1788-1824) - Byron (of Rochdale), George (Gordon), 6th Baron

The most notorious Romantic poet and satirist. Byron was famous in his lifetime for his love affairs with women and Mediterranean boys. He created his own cult of personality, the concept of the 'Byronic hero' - a defiant, melancholy young man, brooding on some mysterious, unforgivable in his past. "There's not a joy the world can give that it takes away / When the glow of early thought declines in feeling's dull decay, / 'Tis not on youth's smooth cheek the blush alone, which fades so fast, / But the tender bloom of heart is gone, ere youth itself be past." Byron's influence on European poetry, music, novel, opera, and painting has been immense, although the poet was widely condemned on moral grounds by his contemporaries.

Polygamy may well be held in dread,
Not only as a sin, but as a bore.
George Gordon, Lord Byron, was the son of Captain John Byron, and Catherine Gordon of Gight, a self-indulgent, somewhat hysterical woman, who was his second wife. He was born with a club-foot and became extreme sensitivity about his lameness. His life did not become easier when he received painful treatments for his foot by a quack practitioner in 1799. Eventually he got a corrective boot. At home Byron's alcoholic governess made sexual advances when he was nine. According to some sources, Byron was also seduced by the lord who rented his mansion before he inherited it.

In his works short and stout Byron glorified proud heroes, who overcome hardships. The poet himself was only 5 feet 8 1/2 inches tall and his widely varying weight ranged from 137 to 202 pounds - he once said that everything he swallowed was instantly converted to tallow and deposited on his ribs. One of his friends noted that at the age of about 30 he looked 40 and "the knuckles of his hands were lost in fat." Byron spent his early childhood years in poor surroundings in Aberdeen, where he was educated until he was ten. His father died in 1791, and the fifth baron's grandson was killed in 1794. After he inherited the title and property of his great-uncle in 1798, he went on to Dulwich, Harrow, where he excelled in swimming, and Cambridge, where he piled up depths and aroused alarm with bisexual love affairs. Staying at Newstead in 1802, he probably first met his half-sister, Augusta Leigh. At the age of fifteen he fell in love with Mary Chaworth, his distant cousin, whom he wrote the poem 'To Emma'.

In 1807 appeared Byron's first collection of poetry, HOURS OF IDLENESS. It received bad reviews. The poet answered his critics with satire ENGLISH BARDS AND SCOTCH REVIEWS in 1808. Next year he took his seat in the House of Lords, and set out on his grand tour, visiting Spain, Albania, Greece, and the Aegean. In Malta he stopped for treatments of gonorrhea.

Success came in 1812 when Byron published the first two cantos of CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE (1812-1818). "I awoke one morning and found myself famous," he later said. He became an adored character of London society, he spoke in the House of Lords effectively on liberal themes, and had a hectic love-affair with Lady Caroline Lamb. ''Mad - bad - and dangerous to know,'' she wrote in her journal on the evening she first saw him. But the love of Byron's life was according to Fiona MacCarthy (see Byron: Life and Legend, 2002) an impoverished choirboy named John Edleston.

[Brit Boi Gee]

During the summer of 1813 Byron apparently entered into a more than brotherly relationship with his half-sister Augusta Leigh, who was a mother of three daughters. In 1814 Augusta gave birth to Elizabeth Medora, who was generally supposed to be Byron's. In the same year he wrote 'Lara,' a poem about a mystical hero, aloof and alien, whose identity is gradually revealed and who dies after a feud in the arms of his page. THE CORSAIR (1814), sold 10,000 copies on the first day of publication. Byron married Anne Isabella Milbanke in 1815, and their daughter Ada was born in the same year. The marriage was unhappy, and they obtained legal separation next year.

When the rumors started to rise of his incest and debts were accumulating, Byron left England in 1816, never to return. ''The only virtue they honor in England is hypocrisy,'' he once wrote a friend. Shortly before leaving England he hired J. W. Polidori as his traveling physician. Polidori was only 20; three patients died under his care, and he committed suicide the age of 26. Byron settled in Geneva with Mary Godwin, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, and Claire Clairmont, who became his mistress. There he wrote the two cantos of Childe Harold and THE PRISONER OF CHILLON. At the end of the summer Byron continued his travels, spending two years in Italy. Observing Byron in an opera box at La Scala in 1816, the French writer Stendhal later recalled: "I was struck by his eyes... I have never in my life seen anything more beautiful or more expressive." While staying in Venice Byron proudly claimed he had different woman on 200 consecutive evenings. His daughter Clara Allegra was born to Claire in January 1817 in England - Byron abandoned Allegra and placed her in a convent near Ravenna; she died in 1822 of typhus fever. In 1819 Byron wrote in a letter to his publisher John Murray: "I am sure my bones would not rest in an English grave, or my clay mix with earth of that country. I believe the thought would drive me mad on my deathbed, could I suppose that any of my friends would be base enough to convey my carcass back to your soil."

During the years in Italy, Byron wrote LAMENT OF TASSO, inspired by his visit in Tasso's cell in Rome, MAZEPPA, THE PROPHECY OF DANTE, and started DON JUAN, his satiric masterpiece. "And for the future - (but I write this reeling, / Having got drunk exceedingly to-day, / So that I seem to stand upon the ceiling) / I say - the future is a serious matter - / And so - for God's sake - hock and soda water!" (from 'Don Juan') Byron lived with Teresa, Countess Guiccioli, in Venice, and followed her household to Ravenna. Teresa left her husband for Byron, and Shelley rented houses in Pisa both for Byron and for the Gambas, Teresa's family. While in Ravenna and Pisa, Byron became deeply interested in drama, and wrote among others THE TWO FOSCARI, SARDANAPALUS, CAIN, and the unfinished HEAVEN AND EARTH. After Byron started to support the Italian insurrectionist Carbonari movement against Austrian rule, the Austrian secret police started to follow his movements. On January 21, 1821, the day before his 33rd birthday, Byron wrote in his diary:

Through life's road, so dim and dirty,
I have dragg'd to three and thirty.
What have these years left to me?
Nothing - except, thirty-three.
With the Gambas, Byron left Pisa for Leghorn, where the journalist and editor Leigh Hunt joined them. He cooperated with Hunt in the production of The Liberal magazine. After a long creative period, Byron had come to feel that action was more important than poetry. With good wishes from Goethe, Byron armed a brig, the Hercules, and sailed to Greece to aid the Greek's, who had risen against their Ottoman overlords. He worked ceaselessly and joined Alexander Mavrocordato on the north shore of the Gulf of Patras. However, before Byron saw any serious military action, he contracted the fever from which he died in Missolonghi on 19 April 1824. Before his death he had suffered a seizure, and his condition was worsened by a leeching procedure. Memorial services were held all over the land. The Greeks wished to bury him in Athens, but only his heart stayed in the country. Part of his skull and his internal organs had been removed for souvenirs. Byron's body was returned to England but refused by the deans of both Westminister and St Paul's. Finally Byron's coffin was placed in the family vault at Hucknall Torkard, near Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire.

SO WE'LL GO NO MORE A ROVING

So we'll go no more a roving
so late into the night
Though the heart be still as loving
And the moon be still as bright.

For the sword outwears the sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And Love itself have rest.

Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we'll go no more a roving
By the light of the moon.

For further reading: The Life, Letters and Journals of Lord Byron by Thomas Moore (1920); The Dramas of Lord Byron: A Critical Study by Samuel Claggett Chew (1970); Lord Byron by Paul Graham Trueblood (1977); Lord Byron and His Contemporaries by Charles E. Robinson (1982); La Vie De Lord Byron En Italie: Romantic Reassessment by Teresa Guiccioli (1983); My Recollections of Lord Byron by Countess Guiccoli (1989); Life of Lord Byron by Roden B. Noel (1990); Critical Essays on Lord Byron, ed. by Robert F. Gleckner (1991); Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers: A Selection from the Letters of Lord Byron's Daughter and Her Description of the First Computer, ed. by Betty A. Toole (1992); Lord Byron by Peter W. Graham (1998); New Essays on Lord Byron ed.by William D. Brewer (1999); Byron: Child of Passion by Benita Eisler (2000); The Kindness of Sisters by David Crane (2001); Byron: Life and Legend by Fiona McCarthy (2002) -- a three-volume biography by Leslie A. Marchand was published in 1958, Marchand also edited Byron's Letters and Journals (12 volumes, published by John Murray) - Note: The high-level universal computer programming language, ADA, was named after Byron's daughter Countess Augusta Ada Lovelace (1815-52), a writer, mathematician, and gambler, a friend of computer pioneer Charles Babbage (1791-1871). - For further information: Byronmania - See also: Aleksandr Pushkin, Harriet Beecher Stowe

Selected works:

HOURS OF IDLENESS, 1807
ENGLISH BARDS AND SCOTCH REVIEWERS, 1809
CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE, 1812-18
THE GIAOUR, 1813
THE BRIDE OF ABYDOS, 1813
THE CORSAIR, 1814
LARA, 1814
HEBREW MELODIES, 1815
THE PRISONER OF CHILLON, 1816
MANFRED, 1817
BEPPO, 1818
MAZEPPA, 1818
DON JUAN, 1819-24
MARINO FALIERO, 1821
THE PROPHECY OF DANTE, 1821
THE TWO FOSCARI, 1821
SARDANAPOULUS, 1821
CAIN, 1821
HEAVEN AND EARTH, 1821
THE VISION ON JUDGMENT, 1822
THE AGE OF BRONZE, 1823
THE ISLAND, 1823
THE DEFORMED TRANSFORMED, 1824
THE LETTERS AND JOURNALS BY LORD BYRON, 1830 (see Thomas Moore)
THE WORKS OF LORD BYRON, 1898 (7 vols)
LORD BYRON'S CORRESPONDENCE, 1922
BYRON'S LETTERS AND JOURNALS, 1973-82 (12 vols., ed. by Leslie A. Marchand)
COMPLETE POETICAL WORKS, 1980-81 (3 vols., ed. by L.A. Marchand)
LORD BYRON: THE COMPLETE MISCELLANEOUS PROSE, 1991

[MisterEThoughts]

he sounds interesting i think i heard of him

[predicate]

"Stanzas to Augusta" (there are two versions, I forget the name of that which I am referring to) is absolutely beautiful.

"From the wreck of the past which hath perished
Thus much I at least may recall
It has taught me that what I most cherished
Deserved to be dearest of all.
In the desert a fountain is sprining
In the wide waste there still is a tree
And a bird in the solitude singing
Which speaks to my spirit of thee"

I have read a bit of his work: a couple short poems and Don Juan. I can't say much about him because I particularly favor poets who write shorter poems - and Byron doesn't have all too many of those - because shorter poems are easier to memorize.

[predicate]

And, by the way, I think these bios to the classic authors are great. Too much bad poetry is written, and too little good poetry is read.

I'm waiting for threads on Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, R. Browning, Tennyson, Blake, and Donne.