George
Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824) was born on 22 January
1788. His mother Catherine came from the lawless line of
Scottish Gordons, and his father, John Byron, of even worse
reputation, had run through his wife's fortune and was hiding
in France. Byron's father died in 1791, and on the death
of his great-uncle
in 1798, Byron inherited the title, the ancestral home of
Newstead,
and a complicated financial situation. As Newstead was by
then uninhabitable, he and his mother lived in Nottingham,
but Byron paid visits to the property, where he fell in
love a neighbor and cousin, an infatuation not returned.
Byron was small for his age and suffered a deformity of
the foot, causing him to limp, and to be bullied at school:
Dulwich and then Harrow. He enrolled at Cambridge, did little
work, kept a bear in his rooms, and ran up more debts. In
June 1809, Byron,
with friends John Cam Hobhouse and William Fletcher, set
off on the customary grand tour, which included Europe and
some parts of the middle east. He had already published
verse, and the latest adventures provided material for Childe
Harold's Pilgrimage, which he worked on for next
eight years. On his homecoming Byron found his mother had
died and his half-sister Augusta unhappily married. But
in 1812 he was persuaded to publish the first two Cantos
of Childe Harold, and became an overnight sensation.
Women flocked to him, and Byron embarked on a string of
affairs, probably with Augusta
too. Eventually, in 1815, he married Annabella
Milbanke, but the marriage soon broke down, and London
society turned against him. Once again, Byron set off for
Europe, where he met Shelley and ended up in Venice. There
his open affair with Countess Guicioli caused more scandal,
not helped by Byron's involvement with republican politics.
Shelley drowned in 1822 and Byron took up the cause of Greek
Independence, sailing for Greece the following year. Byron
took charge of the movement, financing a Greek navy, but
his health was now poor. In 1824 he suffered an epileptic
seizure, and two months later caught a severe chill. He
died on 19 April 1824, unaware that the tide had turned
in England, and that he was again a celebrated figure.
Byron's
poetry
Byron's
first poems appeared in 1806, Fugitive Pieces: pleasant
enough but attacked for the writer's affectations. Byron
counter-attacked with some effective satire: English
Bards and Scotch Reviewers, but wrote little more
until his return from Europe. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage,
a discursive travelogue in Spenserian stanzas, made his
name. Byron eventually finished the poem in Venice, where
he also wrote Manfred,
The
Prisoner Of Chillon, Lament
Of Tasso, Beppo,
Mazeppa,
several slight but well-loved lyrics (So
we'll go no more a-roving, She
walks in beauty, like the night, When
we two parted), and started onDon Juan. The last, worked on in fits and starts,
and unfinished at his death, is Byron's epitaph, the greatest
satire/mock epic in the English language, looser in form
and technique that Pope's verse (which Byron greatly admired)
but with wonderful brio and boisterous fun. Its quotable
lines would make a small book. Don Juan was published
in installments and anonymously in London, where its politics,
amorality and outspokenness caused much trouble. Yet the
book also contained passages of great beauty, a deeply sensitive
portrayal of women, and unvarnished realism. Byron's frankness
was not welcome to the Victorians, and his colloquial language
held little interest to the Modernists (Auden excepted).
But Byron had lived the life he describes, and that honesty
and fearless republicanism made him immensely influential
on the continent, where his portrayal
of the troubled Romantic hero
still accords him a place among the greatest of English
poets.
English
Romantics
The EnglishRomantics,
who broke with the tight forms and propriety of Augustan
verse, were a varied lot. As men of action (Byron),
solitude (Wordsworth),
high flown imagination (Coleridge),
impractical dreams (Shelley),
visionary illumination (Blake)
and much more besides, the Romantics had sensitive if unstable
personalities alive to the currents of the age. Most were
republican, sympathetic to the better aims of the French
Revolution, and to periodic struggles for freedom in Europe.
Return to nature meant not barbarism but simplicity. Sensibility
was not a product of cultivation but an intense expression
of man's passionate nature. The unique, individual and spontaneous
were more valuable than that which conformed to any intellectualized
canon of taste. Social life was indeed analogous to organic
growth, and aspects of social life were related to each
other like functions of a living body. Individual conscience
may be fallible, but it is the role of man's moral sense
to penetrate deeper into the nature of all that exists.
The sense of the dark and hidden, the feeling of dependence
and awe, and a worshipful acceptance of the fullness of
being, are the attitudes which put religious man in touch
with the Divine. The Romantics
therefore took more interest in nature and her moods, in
far-off places and primitive peoples, imagination, spontaneity,
natural religion and individual talent.
Reading further
Byron's
adventurous life — his love affairs, travels, advocacy
of Greek
Independence — make an entertaining entry into
early nineteenth century life: the freebooting ways of the
English aristocracy
before Victorian
morals took hold, the Napoleonic
wars, Venice
in the last years of her splendour, rebellion in the decaying
Ottoman Empire, the frequent
struggles for freedom
in Europe, Russia
and Latin
America. A fascinating period is packed with larger-than-life
characters. Even poets caught some of the fervour: Wordsworth's
affair with Annette Vallon,
Shelley's
utopian outpourings, Keat's
tragic life, Blake's
visions. Good listings of Byron's poetry are to be found
at Selected
Poetry, Representative
Poetry Online, Bartleby
and photoaspects,
and of Byron resources at literaryhistory.com,
Byronomia,
Byron,
and Internet
Resources. Good books include L. Marchand's Byron's
Poetry: A Critical Introduction (1965), M.K. Joseph's
Byron the Poet (1964), E.F. Boyd's Byron's Don
Juan: A Critical Study (1945), R. Escarpit's
Lord Byron, Un Tempérament Littéraire
(1957), W.H. Marshall's The Structure of Byron's Major
Poems (1962), P.G. Thorslev's The Byronic Hero
(1962), J.R. Jackson's Poetry of the Romantic Period
(1980), S. Curran's Poetic Form and British Romanticism
(1986) and H. Fischer's Romantic Verse Narrative (1991).
