1. Printable Version
2. Download PDF
3. Ask a Question
4. Tweet This

Introduction

If I should meet thee
After long years,
How should I greet thee?
With silence and tears.

– George Gordon, Lord Byron
“When We Two Parted”

GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON was born in London on January 22, 1788. His father was a ne'er-do-well soldier of fortune who fought continually with his wife, Lady Catherine Gordon and left before his son was born. Eventually, he was killed in the French Revolution.

Byron suffered from a malformation of the right foot, causing a slight limp. As an adult, he wore special boots to hide the deformity of his foot and the smallness of his calf muscle.

Despite Lady Catherine's title and lineage, Byron and his mother lived in near poverty—her father had committed suicide in 1779, leaving enormous debts, and Byron's father had squandered what little was left of Lady Catherine's fortune—until 1798 when George Gordon became the sixth Baron Byron (Lord Byron) upon the death of his mother's uncle.

While rapidly becoming famous as a poet, Byron was also becoming infamous for his affairs. Eventually, his dalliances would bring so much criticism from his colleagues in the House of Lords and the general populace that he would admit to being afraid to ride in his carriage or attend the theater for fear of being accosted. In 1814, his half-sister, with whom he as very close, had a daughter who was commonly assumed to have been Byron's. When his marriage to Anne Isabella (“Annabella”) Milbanke ended in 1816 amid rumors of domestic violence and adultery, Byron left England forever.

During the summer of 1816, the Byron-Shelley party, which included Byron's personal physician John Polidori, conceived of the ghost-story contest that would result in Mary Shelley's writing Frankenstein and Polidori's writing The Vampire.

Byron also made significant progress on two of his most famous works, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Manfred, and he began the work he would not live to finish, Don Juan.

In 1823, he offered support to Greek insurgents, who were fighting for their independence from the Ottoman Empire. He spent a considerable sum of money from his own fortune refitting the Greek fleet and paying soldiers' salaries. He hoped to lead a unit into combat himself; but, before he was able to experience any action, he fell seriously ill.

Byron died in Greece on April 19, 1824.

1. Notes
2. Reading Pointers for Sharper Insights
3. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
   1. Inroduction
   2. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in Seven Parts
   3. Kubla Khan
4. William Blake
   1. Introduction
   2. The Lamb
   3. The Tyger
   4. The Chimney Sweeper
   5. The Chimney Sweeper
   6. A Poison Tree
5. William Wordsworth
   1. Inroduction
   2. Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798
   3. My Heart Leaps Up
   4. Ode Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
   5. The Lucy Poems
      1. Strange fits of Passion have I Known
      2. She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways
      3. I travelled among unknown men
      4. Three years she grew in sun and shower
      5. A slumber did my spirit seal
6. George Gordon, Lord Byron
   1. Introduction
   2. On the castle of chillon
   3. She walk in beauty
   4. Prometheus
7. Percy Bysshe Shelley
   1. Introduction
   2. Ozymandias
   3. Ode to the West Wind
   4. Adonais
8. John Keats
   1. Introduction
   2. To Hope
   3. Ode on Melancholy
   4. Ode to a Nightingale
9. Copyright