Byron, Lord (1788-1824), was the most colorful of the English Romantic poets. Many people find his adventurous life as interesting as his poetry. Byron often set his poems in Europe and the Near East, and they reflect his own experiences and beliefs. Byron’s poetry is sometimes violent, sometimes tender, and frequently exotic. However, the underlying theme is always Byron’s insistence that people be free to choose their own course in life.
Byron’s life.
George Gordon Byron was born on Jan. 22, 1788, in London, but he lived most of his first 10 years in Scotland with his mother. His father, who had abandoned Byron’s mother, died when the boy was 3. Byron inherited the title Lord Byron at the age of 10, upon the death of his great-uncle. He then returned to England, where he attended Harrow School and Cambridge University. Byron’s first book of poems, Hours of Idleness (1807), was severely criticized by the Edinburgh Review, a Scottish literary magazine. Byron replied with English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809), a verse satire in which he attacked almost every notable literary figure of the day.
From 1809 to 1811, Byron traveled through southern Europe and parts of the Near East. In 1812, he published the first two cantos (sections) of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. These cantos, set in the countries he had recently visited, chiefly Portugal, Spain, Albania, and Greece, immediately established his fame. Eastern verse tales, such as The Bride of Abydos (1813) and The Corsair (1814), kept him in the public eye. In 1815, Byron married Anne Isabella Milbanke. They had a brief, unhappy marriage, during which a daughter, Ada, was born. The marriage ended partly because of rumors that Byron had committed incest with his half-sister, Augusta Leigh. Byron left England forever in 1816.
Byron spent several months in Switzerland, where he met fellow poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Byron then settled in Italy, where he carried on a long romance with the Countess Teresa Guiccioli and became involved in Italian revolutionary politics. Byron also wrote such works as the verse dramas Manfred (1817) and Cain (1821). His last and greatest work was the long, unfinished epic Don Juan. In 1823, while writing this poem, Byron decided to join the Greeks in their war for independence from the Ottoman Empire, which was based in what is now Turkey. After a brief illness, he died on April 19, 1824, in Missolonghi, Greece.
Byron’s poetry.
Hours of Idleness is mainly a collection of the learned and romantic poses expected of young poets at that time. In English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, however, Byron adopted the biting, satiric style used by the poet Alexander Pope in his Dunciad.
Byron wrote the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage as a fictional allegory using the stanza form and many features of the literary style of the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser. This work and the sequence of “Turkish Tales” (1813-1816) that followed defined the character type known as “the Byronic hero.” This character is the melancholy, defiant, proudly self-assured man associated with Byron and widely imitated in later literature. In canto III (1816) and canto IV (1818), Byron identifies himself with Harold and through him expresses the loss and defiance the poet felt while living abroad.
During Byron’s last years, he wrote several types of works, notably such historical and Biblical tragedies as Sardanapalus (1821) and Cain. But the masterpiece of his Italian period is Don Juan. Byron wrote the poem in the loose, flexible Italian verse form called ottava rima. The poem deflates the legendary lover Don Juan to the level of a comic epic hero. The most important element in Don Juan, however, is the narrator, a free and self-contradictory spirit whose tone changes continually, ranging through the forceful, biting, sentimental, cynical, self-mocking, and self-assured. The narrator’s voice maintains Byron’s scorn for what he called cant, the deceptions played by individuals and societies upon one another. Despite the range of Byron’s poetry, that scorn is the main force running from the beginning to the end of his career.
See also She Walks in Beauty.
