Lord Byron

I

Introduction

Lord Byron (1788-1824), English poet, who was one of the most important and versatile writers of the romantic movement (see Romanticism).

George Gordon Noel Byron, 6th Baron Byron, was born in London on January 22, 1788, and educated at Harrow School and the University of Cambridge. He succeeded to the title and estates of his granduncle William, 5th Baron Byron, upon William’s death in 1798. Lord Byron adopted the name Noel as his third given name in 1822, in order to receive an inheritance from his mother-in-law.

In 1807 a volume of Byron’s poems, Hours of Idleness, was published. An adverse review of this work in the Edinburgh Review prompted a satirical reply from Byron in heroic couplets, entitled English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809). In 1809 Byron took his seat in the House of Lords. Also in 1809 he began two years of travel in Portugal, Spain, and Greece.

II

Fame and Marriage

The publication in 1812 of the first two cantos of the travelogue Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage brought Byron fame. The poem presents a view of Europe colored by the violent sensibilities of its melancholic and passionate narrator, Childe Harold. Childe Harold is the first example of what came to be known as the Byronic hero, the isolated, self-reliant young man of stormy emotions who shuns humanity and wanders through life weighted by a sense of guilt for mysterious sins of his past. The Byronic hero is, to some extent, modeled on the life and personality of Byron himself. Byron went on to develop this hero figure in the four Oriental tales, The Giaour (1813), The Bride of Abydos (1813), The Corsair (1814), and Lara (1814). In Hebrew Melodies (1815) the familiar Byronic theme of exile becomes a meditation on the Jewish Diaspora.

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Byron married Anna Isabella Milbanke in 1815. After giving birth to a daughter, Augusta Ada, Byron’s only legitimate child, Lady Byron left her husband. In 1816 Byron agreed to legal separation from his wife. Rumors about his incestuous relationship with his half-sister Augusta and doubts about his sanity led to his being ostracized by society. Deeply embittered, Byron left England in 1816 and never returned.

III

Exile

In Geneva, Byron wrote the third canto of Childe Harold and the narrative poem The Prisoner of Chillon (1816). He next established residence in Venice, where he produced, among other works, the fourth and final canto of Childe Harold (1818) and the first two cantos of Don Juan (1818-1819). Byron’s first verse drama, Manfred, was completed in 1819. Not intended for the stage, Manfred is a drama of ideas. It draws on the legend of Faust, who gave his soul to the devil in exchange for superhuman powers. Unlike Faust, Manfred, the ideal Byronic hero, rejects the opportunity to barter with the powers of darkness. Instead he becomes fully autonomous, independent of any external control. As a result, Manfred is judged and eventually destroyed by his own mind.

After traveling through Italy for two years, Byron settled in Pisa in 1821. He wrote the verse dramas Cain and Sardanapalus and the narrative poems Mazeppa and The Island during these years. In 1822, with the poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and Leigh Hunt, he started a journal called The Liberal, but Shelley’s death by drowning that year and a quarrel with Hunt put an end to this venture after only three issues had been printed.

Byron’s masterpiece, Don Juan (1823), a mock epic in 16 cantos, attacks the vices of hypocrisy, oppression, complacency, lust, and greed. It draws on the legend of Don Juan, a Spanish hero renowned for his promiscuous affairs with women. Byron uses satire to create a comical Don Juan who is not the active seducer but the passive seduced. Some even argue that Don Juan is upstaged by the narrator as a more complex and compelling comic figure. The narrator’s monologues commenting on the institutions and values of Western society often overshadow the story itself. Byron left the poem unfinished.

IV

War and Death

In July 1823 Byron, bored with his life, stopped writing and joined the Greeks in their struggle for independence from the Ottoman Empire. This conflict came to be known as the Greek War of Independence. Byron was familiar with the conditions in Greece from his earlier travels, and he felt compelled to become involved. He recruited and trained a regiment of soldiers and gave large sums of money to the cause. The Greeks made him commander in chief of their forces in January 1824. Soon after, he suffered a series of illnesses complicated by the treatments he received. Byron died at Mesolóngion on April 19th, 1824, just after his 36th birthday.