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Portrait of Lord Byron

Literature · Poets

Lord Byron

1788–1824 · English (Anglo-Scottish)

Romanticism; satire

George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, was the most famous poet of his age and the model for the brooding, defiant "Byronic hero". Childe Harold's Pilgrimage made him an overnight celebrity in 1812, and his comic epic Don Juan is one of the great satirical poems in English. Scandal drove him from England in 1816, and he died at Missolonghi in 1824 while supporting the Greek War of Independence.

How to spot them

  • ▸'Mad, bad and dangerous to know' (Lady Caroline Lamb)
  • ▸Childe Harold's Pilgrimage; 'awoke one morning and found myself famous'
  • ▸Don Juan in ottava rima; 'She walks in beauty, like the night'
  • ▸Father of Ada Lovelace; swam the Hellespont; died at Missolonghi
  • ▸Newstead Abbey; the Villa Diodati ghost-story contest of 1816

Key works

Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812–1818)

Travel poem in Spenserian stanzas whose first two cantos made him famous overnight

Don Juan (1819–1824)

Unfinished comic epic in ottava rima following the amorous adventures of Juan

She Walks in Beauty (1815)

Lyric from Hebrew Melodies, said to be inspired by his cousin by marriage in mourning dress

The Destruction of Sennacherib (1815)

Hebrew Melodies poem beginning 'The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold'

Manfred (1817)

Verse drama of a guilt-haunted Faustian nobleman in the Alps

The Prisoner of Chillon (1816)

Narrative poem on the Genevan patriot François Bonivard, imprisoned at Chillon Castle

English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809)

Satire replying to the Edinburgh Review's attack on his first collection, Hours of Idleness

So, we'll go no more a roving (1817 (published 1830))

Short lyric from a letter to Thomas Moore

Key ideas

  • The Byronic hero: proud, moody, passionate, alienated and secretly guilty
  • Mock-heroic digression and deflating rhymes in Don Juan
  • Championed liberal and nationalist causes, notably Greek independence

Quick-fire facts

  • •Born in London with a deformed right foot; inherited the barony and Newstead Abbey aged ten
  • •Kept a tame bear at Trinity College, Cambridge, since dogs were forbidden
  • •Swam the Hellespont from Sestos to Abydos in 1810, in imitation of Leander
  • •His only legitimate child, Ada (later Countess of Lovelace), was born to Annabella Milbanke in 1815
  • •At the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva in 1816 he proposed the ghost-story contest that produced Frankenstein and Polidori's The Vampyre
  • •Died of fever at Missolonghi, Greece, on 19 April 1824
  • •Buried at Hucknall, Nottinghamshire, after Westminster Abbey refused him; a memorial was placed in Poets' Corner in 1969
  • •Don Juan is pronounced by Byron 'Joo-an', rhyming with 'true one'

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Sources