Art And Literature

George Gordon Byron was born on 22 January 1788. His names changed through out his life. he was born to Captain John Byron, and Catherine Gordon. He was also known as Lord George Gordon Noel Byron and commonly as Lord Byron. Lord Byron was an English poet and a leading figure in Romanticism.

Byron spent his early childhood years in poor surroundings in Aberdeen, where he was educated until he was ten. After he inherited the title and property of his great-uncle in 1798, he went on to Dulwich, Harrow, and Cambridge, where he piled up debts and aroused alarm with bisexual love affairs. Staying at Newstead in 1802, he probably first met his half-sister, Augusta Leigh with whom he was later suspected of having an incestuous relationship.

In 1807 Byron’s first collection of poetry, Hours Of Idleness appeared. It received bad reviews. However his real poetic success came in 1812 when Byron published the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in 1812. Amongst Byron’s best-known works are the brief poems She Walks in Beauty, When We Two Parted, and So, we’ll go no more a roving, in addition to the narrative poems Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Don Juan. He is regarded as one of the greatest British poets and remains widely read and influential, both in the English-speaking world and beyond.

Byron’s notability rests not only on his writings but also on his life, which featured aristocratic excesses, huge debts, numerous love affairs, and self-imposed exile. He was famously described by Lady Caroline Lamb as “mad, bad and dangerous to know”. Byron served as a regional leader of Italy’s revolutionary organization, the Carbonari, in its struggle against Austria. He later travelled to fight against the Ottoman Empire in the Greek War of Independence, for which Greeks revere him as a national hero. He died on 19 April 1824, from a fever contracted while in Messolonghi in Greece.

Lord Byron is attributed as one of the most important figures of the Romantic Movement (1785–1830; a period when English literature was full of virtuous heroes and themes of love and triumph). Because of his works, active life, and physical beauty he came to be considered the perfect image of the romantic poet-hero; the concept of the ‘Byronic hero’.

<= The Selected Poems of Lord Byron =>

• When We Two Parted

• We’ll Go No Mpre A-Roving

• There Be None of Beauty’s Daughters

• She Walks in Beauty

• Prometheus

• On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year

• The Eve of Waterloo

• The Destruction of Sennacherib

• Darkness

• And Thou Art Dead, As Young and Fair