Byron, George Gordon

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BYRON, GEORGE GORDON

BYRON, GEORGE GORDON (1788–1824), English poet.

George Gordon, sixth baron Byron entered Harrow School in 1801 and Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1805. He took his seat in the House of Lords in 1809. The final stage of Byron's education was the grand tour of Europe, which he undertook from 1809 to 1811. The Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815) prevented the usual culmination of the tour in Italy, and Byron traveled instead through Portugal, Spain, Gibraltar, and Malta to the more exotic regions of Albania, the Greek provinces of the Ottoman Empire, and Asia Minor.

His first volume of poetry was Fugitive Pieces (1806), which he destroyed; his subsequent Hours of Idleness (1807) received a sharply critical notice in the Edinburgh Review (January 1808), which provoked Byron to a satiric riposte, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809). Byron's first major success was achieved with the publication of the poetic journal of his grand tour, the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812). As he commented, he "awoke and found himself famous." His travels continued to provide him with exotic coloring for a series of oriental romances: The Giaour (1813), The Bride of Abydos (1813), The Corsair (1814), Lara (1814), and The Siege of Corinth (1816). The sensational success of these poems can be attributed to his creation of the Byronic hero, a powerful and misanthropic outlaw figure who is also a man of feeling. The public identified the poet with his creation and saw him as sexually attractive. Numerous sexual scandals were followed by a hasty marriage, in 1815, to an heiress, Anne Isabella Milbanke, who separated from him in 1816 in a cloud of vague allegations that included homosexuality and incest with his half sister, Augusta Leigh.

Byron retired abroad and never returned to England. He lived for a while on Lake Geneva with Percy Bysshe and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. From Switzerland he moved to Venice and he remained in Italy, in various locations, until his departure to Greece (1823) to join the insurgents in the Greek War of Independence. His best known sexual liaison at the time involved Teresa Guiccioli (wife of Count Gamba). Politically, he committed himself to an Italian nationalist secret society, the Carbonari. His death in Greece (19 April 1824) gave him the status of a martyr for national freedom. As both a person and a poet, Byron became an inspiration for nationalist movements in Europe throughout the nineteenth century.

The immediate poetic products of his life abroad were two further cantos of Childe Harold (1816–1818), which lamented the condition of post-Napoleonic Europe, which he conflated with his individual predicament, and the Faustian drama Manfred (1817), which has often been interpreted as a confession of love for his half sister. A number of his other works reflect the personal and political frustrations of the time, notably The Prisoner of Chillon (1816) and two Venetian political dramas about failed aristocratic revolt, Marino Faliero and The Two Foscari (both 1821). The metaphysical drama Cain (1821) was condemned by many as a satanic attack on Christianity.

In 1818 Byron's writing took an unexpected direction with Beppo, a comic tale in ottava rima, in which a cuckolded Venetian husband happily settles for an open marriage. The verbal felicity and satiric potential of the new style led Byron to begin the first canto of what became his uncompleted epic, Don Juan (1819–1824). This retelling of the Don Juan story subverted the usual moralistic treatment of the legend by making Juan the innocent victim of women. Juan's adventures took him from Spain to Turkey, Russia, and England and provided an opportunity for Byron to comment on current history and the uncertainty of all philosophical explanations of the human condition. The poem was uncompleted when Byron died, leaving Juan on the verge of joining the French Revolution as Anarchasis Cloots, the spokesman for all humankind, who would be guillotined by his own side.

The other major poem of Byron's last years is The Vision of Judgment (1822), which was published as a riposte to the English poet laureate Robert Southey's elegy on the death of George III. Southey had attacked Byron as a member of a "Satanic School" of poetry. Byron parodied Southey's poem, turning it into an attack on the king and ridiculing Southey as a prostitute sycophant.

Nineteenth-century criticism of Byron admired his early sentimental verse. Recent criticism has preferred his later satires for their liberalism, their commitment to freedom (both political and personal), and their postmodern sense of irony. The poet's sympathetic portrayal of women (despite his promiscuity) has attracted feminist critics and his (recently revealed) homosexuality has made him a gay icon. His most admiring audience, however, remains the Greeks.

bibliography

Primary Sources

Marchand, Leslie A., ed. Byron's Letters and Journals: The Complete and Unexpurgated Text of All Letters Availablein Manuscript and the Full Printed Version of All Others. 13 vols. London, 1973–1994.

McGann, Jerome J., ed., Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works. 7 vols. Oxford, U.K., 1980–1993.

Nicholson, Andrew, ed., Lord Byron: The Complete Miscellaneous Prose. Oxford, U.K., 1991.