Byron

Date of Birth: 22 January 1788

Date of Death: 19 April 1824

Works.

English romantic poet and satirist.
Principal works include Childe Harolde's Pilgrimage (1812-18), The Bride of
Abydos, The Corsair and The Giaour (1813), Lara (1814), The Prisoner of
Chillon (1816), Beppo (1817), Don Juan (1819), The Two Foscari (1821),
Sardanapalus and Cain (1821), Werner, The Age of Bronze and The Island (1823).
His letters and journals, many of them apparently written with an eye for
publication are also considered to be part of his opus.
Byron enjoyed a vast and durable reputation as a poet and his character,
unconventional lifestyle and poetic style have synthesised to create the image
of the Byronic hero.

Other romantic poets include Keats, Burns, Coleridge and Wordsworth.

Featured Works.

'When We Two Parted', 'To Thomas Moore', 'Churchill's Grave', 'Stanzas To
Augusta', 'Stanzas For Music', 'To Thyrza: And Thou Art Dead', 'Stanzas for
Music There's Not a Joy the World Can Give', 'Lines Inscribed Upon a Cup
Formed From a Skull', 'On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year', 'On
Chillon', 'The Destruction of Sennacherib', 'A Spirit Passed Before Me', 'So,
We'll Go No More a Roving', 'She Walks in Beauty', 'Darkness', 'Lines Written
Beneath an Elm in the Churchyard of Harrow', 'Solitude', 'Stanzas to the Po',
'Epistle to Augusta', 'Lines, On Hearing That Lady Byron Was Ill', 'Written
After Swimming from Sestos to Abydos', 'Stanzas Written on the Road Between
Florence and Pisa', 'The Dream', 'Oh! Snatched Away in Beauty's Bloom',
'Remember thee! Remember thee! '.

General Comment.

George Gordon Byron was the son of Captain John Byron by his marriage to the
Scottish Catherine Gordon of Gight. He was born with a club foot of which he
was very self-conscious and educated in Aberdeen, where his family had moved
to escape their debts, and at Harrow and Cambridge.
Byron inherited the family home, Newstead Abbey, following the deaths of his
father in 1791 and grandfather in 1798. He took up his seat in the House of
Lords in 1808 and then left to travel in Europe, at which time he began
writing his immensely popular poem Childe Harolde, returning to a political
role again in 1813 when he spoke on liberal themes in the House.
In 1815 he married Annabella Milbanke, but she left him soon afterwards,
taking their child with her. Throughout his life he fathered several
illegitimate children and had numerous scandalous affairs, the most notorious
being with his half-sister Augusta, his father's daughter by an earlier
marriage. This affair horrified English society and encouraged Byron in his
decision to leave England for good in 1816. He stayed with the Shelleys in
Geneva, where he wrote The Prisoner of Chillon, then after a trip to Rome in
1817 he returned to Venice where he wrote Beppo his first work in a new ironic
style. Don Juan was begun the following year.
Fired by the Greek battle for independence from Turkey, Byron sailed to
Missolonghi in 1824, where he gave money and inspiration to the rebels but
died of a fever before seeing action.