George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824)

For many of his contemporaries in England, Europe, and America, Byron was the embodiment of the Romantic spirit, both in his poetry and in his personal life. Proud, passionate, rebellious, deeply marked by painful and often mysterious experi­ences in the past, yet fiercely and defiantly com­mitted to following his own individual destiny — this was the image that Byron created for his con­temporaries and passed on to subsequent ages.

Byron was descended from two aristocratic but violent and undisciplined families. His father, a reckless English sea captain and fortune hunter, was called "Mad Jack" Byron; his mother, Cath­arine Gordon of Gight, came from a line of fiery-tempered, lawless Scottish nobles. Byron was born in London, but at the age of three, shortly after his father died, he was taken by his mother to Aber­deen, where he was brought up in, and the strict re­ligious environment of Scottish Presbyterianism. Byron's mother was loving but very ill-tempered, and she often quarreled with her impetuous, high-spirited son. Although an extremely handsome boy, Byron had been born with a clubfoot. The pain and self-consciousness caused by this deformity was aggravated by a corrective shoe, which Byron's mother, on the advice of an inept physician, forced him to wear. Byron struggled all his-life with the physical and psychological effects of his deformity. He was especially proud of his athletic prowess at swimming, riding, boxing, and cricket, and of his good looks, which he was always fearful of losing.

When Byron was ten years old, his great uncle, known as the "Wicked Lord," died, and Byron inherited his title to become the sixth Lord Byron. Byron was also heir to the ancestral estate, New-stead Abbey. He was sent to Harrow, one of Eng­land's most prestigious private schools, and then to Cambridge University. It was at Cambridge that Byron began to write poetry, and to assume a flam­boyant, outrageous style of life that would become his trademark. He spent much of the money he inherited on expensive clothes and decorations for his college rooms; he entertained lavishly; he kept horses and a pet bear; and he loved to shock his friends by drinking out of a cup made from a human skull. In 1807 Byron published his lyric poems in a small volume called Hours of Idleness. The volume was sharply attacked in the influential Edinburgh Review, and Byron responded with his first important poem, a biting satire in the eight­eenth-century manner, called English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.

In 1809, after graduating from Cambridge, Byron set out with a close friend on an extended tour of countries not immediately involved in the Napole­onic Wars: Spain, Portugal, Albania, Greece, Asia Minor. He used the experiences of this journey as the basis for the first two cantos of a marvelous po­etic travelogue entitled Childe Harold's Pilgrim­age, which he published soon after his return to England in 1812. The work was enormously suc­cessful. As Byron himself recalled, "I awoke one morning and found myself famous." He became the greatest literary and social celebrity of Regency London. His reputation grew still further with the publication of a series of Romantic verse narratives with exotic, Near-Eastern settings: The Giaour, The Corsair, and Lara.

The appeal of these poems lay only partly in their descriptions of foreign scenes and customs. In them, and in the verse dramas a few years later, Byron created the figure subsequently known as the "Byronic hero": a passionate, moody, restless character who has exhausted most of the world's excitements, and who lives under the weight of some mysterious sin committed in the past. His proud, defiant individualism refuses to be limited by the normal institutional and moral strictures of society. He is an "outsider" whose daring life both isolates him and makes him attractive. Most of Byron's readers identified him personally with his heroes. And despite his protests that such connec­tions should never be taken seriously, it seems clear that Byron partly enjoyed the identity, at least at the beginning of his career, and sometimes tried to project it in his own behavior.

In 1815, at the height of his popularity, Byron married Annabella Milbanke, who sought to make him into a conventional and respectable husband. But Byron was soon involved in bitter quarrels with his wife over his unconventional behavior and his continuing love affairs. When she left him after only a year of marriage, Byron found himself surrounded by scandal and ostracized by the very society that had made him its favorite. Bitter but defiant as always, Byron left England on April 25, 1816, and was never to return.

Byron resumed his travels in Europe, living first at Geneva in Switzerland, where he became close friends with Shelley and where he produced a mag­nificent third canto of Childe Harold. Then he moved to Venice, where he perpetuated his reputa­tion for fast living and began his greatest work, the satirical epic Don Juan. Byron's hero is not, as we would expect, the adult Don Juan, the notorious lover who would seem to lie closest to Byron's own personality and to that of his earlier "Byronic heroes." He is rather an original version of the boyish and youthful Don Juan, a fresh, energetic, impressionable young man whose curiosity and at­tractiveness to women enable Byron to expose both the foolishness and cruelty of life and the wonderful richness of earthly-experience. Byron himself makes his presence felt in Don Juan primarily through the voice of the narrator, who appears to be making up his poem as he goes along and who recounts the adventures of Don Juan (a younger version of himself) with a splendid bal­ance of satire and sympathy.

Byron eventually moved to Pisa where he again joined Shelley, who was living there among a small circle of friends. After Shelley's death and the breakup of the "Pisan Circle," Byron again grew restless. Always an ardent spokesman for political freedom, he saw Greece, the ancient home of de­mocracy, struggling to win its independence from Turkey. He invested a great deal of money and energy in organizing an expedition, which he him­self led, to help the Greek cause. While training troops in the squalid, marshy town of Missolonghi, he was stricken with a severe fever. Byron died on April 19, 1824, shortly after his thirty-sixth birth­day. Although his practical contribution to the Greek army was insignificant, his presence and tragic death produced a vital spark of inspiration for the eventual liberation of the country. He is still regarded in Greece as a national hero.

Despite his status as the archetypal Romantic, Byron had stronger ties to the eighteenth century than any of his contemporaries. He was a great admirer of Dryden and Pope, and he was sharply critical of all his fellow Romantics, except Shelley, for having devoted themselves to "a wrong revolu­tionary poetical system." His affinities with the eighteenth century are apparent not only in Eng­lish Bards and Scotch Reviewers, Don Juan, and his other satires, but also in many of his shorter lyrics and songs. Some of these extend the Cavalier tradition of elegant, graceful compliment to a lady. Others belong to the gentlemanly eighteenth-cen­tury tradition of witty, extemporaneous reflection on a passing occasion. As a man Byron was capable of many moods and many roles, and we can see this reflected in the variety of his poetry. But behind all the different roles and postures we sense that powerful, self-conscious personality that holds as much fascination for us today as it did for Byron's own era.