By Lechi Eke
George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron (1788-1824) was the most fashionable, flamboyant and notorious of the Romantic poets. He created the Byronic hero, an immensely popular literary antihero of whom he seemed a perfect model, as exclaimed by one of his many lovers: “Byron is mad, bad and dangerous to know!”
He lived by his own values of personal freedom and hedonism.
Considered one of the leading figures of the Romantic literary movement, Byron was also a revolutionary in the Greek War of Independence.
He was influential and widely read. Regarded as one of the best poets writing in the English language, Byron was best known for his two lengthy poems: Don Juan and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, although he was prolific and wrote so many other books including three Gothic novels and a collection of lyrical poems under the title Hebrew Melodies.
Yet, Lord Byron’s lifestyle will turn the red district of the sin city an innocent playground. He committed every sexual sin in the book, except maybe bestiality (that is if he didn’t, because he loved and lived with (inside his home) many animals including: horses, fox, monkeys, guinea hens, Egyptian crane, peacocks, heron, goat, bear, dog (of his dog Boatswain, he wrote a 26 line poem titled Epitaph To a Dog, and an epitaph on the head of the impressive marble he erected for the dog reads, “To mark a friend’s remains these stones arise/I never knew but one – and here he lies)).”
Bryon committed fornication, adultery, sodomy, incest and what have you!
Education: Harrow (1801-1805) and Cambridge (1805-1808), period spent in sexual escapades, gambling, boxing (despite deformity in his right foot), and horse riding. Lord Byron was a liberal, and a well travelled man, travellling Europe along the Mediterranean.
He lived in Venice, Ravenna and Pisa, all in Italy, for seven years and frequently visited his fellow poet, friend and countryman, P. B. Shelley and Mary, his second wife. He also was in an affair with Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont.
A bisexual (term unfamiliar in his days), Bryon was a violent man and came from a family of money lovers. His father’s two marriages were finance-inclined and so were his grandfather’s. They all married women for their inheritances and took on parts of their names. Gordon and Noel were parts of the names of the Byrons’ spouses, taken on in order to inherit the women’s wealth!
Byron’s 1806 book, Childish Recollections, contains nostalgic escapades of his Harrow days in which he shared a clairvoyant insight into a future of ‘sexual differences’ that in future made England a place not to be for him. Homosexuality in those days attracted death penalty (public hanging). There are evidences found in Byron’s collection of letters that he was romantically involved with a younger boy at Harrow named John Thomas Claridge.
About a later friendship with a boy named John Edleston at Trinity College, Cambridge, Byron wrote, “His voice first attracted my attention, his countenance fixed it, and his manners attached me to him forever.”
Byron’s Thyrza, a series of elegies, were composed in Edleston’s memory. Even his poem, The Cornelian, was written about the gift of a cornelian Byron received from Edleston.
Friends
Lord Byron was a man with many friends. His life-long friend, John Cam Hobhouse initiated him into the Cambridge Whig Club that supported liberal politics. He was also in good friendship with Francis Hodgson who was a Fellow in King’s College whom he shared literary matters with until his expiration.
Of course there were great literary friends like Mr and Mrs P. B. Shelley, John Keats, Leigh Hunt, Thomas Love Peacock, etc.
As a youngster, Byron who had great friendship with Elizabeth Bridget Pigot and her brother John, staged two plays for the entertainment of their community, encouraged, he ventured to publish his first volume of poetry titled, Fugitives Pieces. However, on the advice of his friend, Rev. J. T. Becher, the publication was recalled and burnt because it contained unwholesome materials like the poem To Mary, and others which had amorous verses, some written when he was as young as 17.
When Bryon published his next volume, Hours of Idleness, albeit, anonymously, it received heavy criticism from Peter Brougham in the Edinburgh Review, and this prompted Bryon’s first satire titled, English Bard and Scotch Reviewers (1809). Later in life, it became an honour to be the target of Byron’s pen!
In 1812, Bryon published the first two cantos of his long poem, Childe of Harold’s Pilgrimage and it received such an acclaim that Bryon wrote, “I awoke one morning and found myself famous.”
Also well received was Don Juan which spans 17 cantos and is regarded as one of the most important long poems in English after Milton’s Paradise Lost. The early cantos presented a humourous outlook, but were shocking to early Victorians. Nonetheless, it reflected Byron’s contemporary world socially, politically, literarily and ideologically. It portrays literary tradition and is regarded as the epic of its time. However, subsequent cantos of the poem elicited a public outrage which forced further publications to cease.
He followed with his celebrated Oriental Tales with such poems as The Bride of Abydos, The Cosair, Lara and Giaour. At the same time, Byron began his affair with his future biographer, Thomas Moore!
A well travelled man; it was suspected that Byron fled England for a number of reasons.
He was in debts, so to flee his debtors; he was out of affection with a ‘maid’, so to flee her neediness for which he wrote the poem, To a Lady: On Being Asked My Reason for Quitting England in the Spring; he was attracted to Islam, especially Sufi mysticism. However, according to his friend, Charles Skinner Matthews, a major motive for Bryon’s travels, was ‘in hope of homosexual experience!’
Anyway, it should be noted that travelling was customary in his days for young noble men.
Lady Caroline Lamb, one of the many married women whom Byron had an affair with gave him what would become his lasting epitaph saying he was “mad, bad and dangerous to know.” Byron himself nicknamed himself “le diable boiteux” meaning “the limping devil” because of his club right foot.
He also wrote Irish Avatar, a satire in which he trashed British tyranny, nepotism and lackey. He persuades the Irish to see in George IV the British government who had taken away their freedom. He calls the Irish to rise up against British tyranny and praises those who were already involved in the freedom fight.
Lord Byron like many poets used his pen to fight what he deemed injustice. In his poem The Curse of Minerva, he lashes out at Lord Elgin for his removal of the Parthenon marbles which came from Greece. He further denounced Elgin’s action in Canto II of his long poem, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
In his time, Lord Byron was thought to be the greatest poet in the world. He was the forerunner of the modern celebrity. His wife Annabella coined the term Byromania to describe the commotion surrounding the poet in his time. He was the personification of the Byronic hero.
Byron was fascinating and famous. He even instructed artists never to paint him in a dull moment of holding a pen or book, but as a man of action.
Byronic Influences
Byron influenced continental literature. Over 40 operas have been based on his works, including three operas about him. His poetry was set to music by many of the Romantic composers like Beethoven, Rossini, Mendelssohn, Schubert, Carl Lowe and Schumann. Hector Berlioz, whose operas and Memoires portrayed Byron’s influence, was among his greatest admirers.
The Byronic Hero
The Byronic hero was invented by Lord Byron in his works. It is portrayed as an idealized but flawed central figure who had great talents, ardor, distaste for social institutions, ranks and privileges, although he possesses both. This character is rebellious, arrogant, has skeletons in his cupboard, often thwarted in love by social constraint or death; overconfident but lacks foresight and eventually has a self destructive attitude.
The Byronic hero has become popular both in literature, pop culture and politics. This hero is echoed in Nietzsche’s Superman. Continental Europe admired Lord Byron much more than his country, England.
Byron died at 36, in Greece as he was preparing to lead some troops against the Ottoman Empire. Record has it that he contracted a fever after the 1st and 2nd siege of Missolonghi in Greece. Greeks’ admiration for Byron is akin to veneration. In 1881 the king of Greece donated a marble for his tomb.
But in Britain, where his corpse was sent back (without his heart, the Greek took his heart and gave it a befitting burial), he was treated with contempt. His school refused a plot to bury him; he was not accorded any national honour. That was because his lifestyle had shocked his people: he had had publicized affairs with men and married women, little boys, little girls and even a half-sister!
His friends contributed 1000 pounds to commission a statue of the poet. From 1824 when Byron died, to 1834, British institutions turned it down. His friends had to put the statue in storage. The British Museum, the National Gallery, St. Paul’s Cathedral, Westminster Abbey, all rejected the statue.
Finally, ten years later, Trinity College, Cambridge accepted it but placed it in the library!
In 1969, 145 years after Lord Byron’s death, a memorial for him was finally placed in Westminster Abbey, after being lobbied for since 1907. The New York Times observing all the goings on concerning the famous writer wrote, “People are beginning to ask whether this ignoring of Byron is not a thing of which Britain should be ashamed …a bust or a tablet might be put in the Poets’ Corner and England be relieved of ingratitude toward one of her really great sons.”
Someone had remarked that Bryon’s dog got a more befitting burial than its master!
Found as the causes of Byron’s deviant sexual orientation were sexual encounters with his caretaker, May or Mary Gray, who was said to have been joining Byron in bed when he was nine and ‘played tricks with his person.’ Another was the advances which might not have ended in advances only, from Byron’s mother’s lover, one Lord Grey De Ruthyyn.
Biographers suggested that these prompted Byron’s sexual liaisons with young boys and sexual incontinent.
Books by Lord Byron
Don Juan, Childe Harold Pilgrimage
Gothic novels: The Castle. The Love Poems of Lord Bryon, etc.
Quotes from Bryon
Always laugh when you can. It is cheap medicine.
Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart, it is woman’s whole existence.
Friendship is Love without wings!
If I don’t write to empty my mind, I go mad.
To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.
A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn’t know.
It is very certain that the desire of life prolongs it.
One of the many famous poems of Byron is, She Walks in Beauty, a poem he wrote in praise of a female cousin of his whom he ran into at a party in London. She was in mourning and wearing black with glittering sequins. Another famous poem of his is the one below:
When We Two Parted
When we two parted
In silence and tears,
Half broken-hearted
To sever for years,
Pale grew thy cheek and cold,
Colder thy kiss;
Truly that hour foretold
Sorrow to this.
The dew of the morning
Sunk chill on my brow —
It felt like the warning
Of what I feel now.
Thy vows are all broken,
And light is thy fame:
I hear thy name spoken,
And share in its shame.
They name thee before me,
A knell to my ear;
A shudder comes o’er me—
Why wert thou so dear?
They know not I knew thee,
Who knew thee too well –
Long, long shall I rue thee,
Too deeply to tell.
In secret we met –
In silence I grieve,
That thy heart could forget,
Thy spirit deceive.
If I should meet thee
After long years,
How should I greet thee?
With silence and tears.
I suppose that this poem was directed to one of the many married women Byron had brief and fiery affairs with because from his biographies, he seemed to tire easily over an affair since he was into men and women at once. The lines: “They know not I knew thee well/In secret we met – in silence I grieve” – show that it was an illicit affair.
The poet’s persona describes a feeling of disillusionment with a lover, and detachment from the same lover. It is certainly an illicit affair – “They name thee first…” It is always a woman that is named first in such affairs and blamed.
Other popular poems by Byron are: Lara, Darkness, The Destruction of Sennacherib, Solicitude, and others. He employs metre, anapest, blank verse, heroic couplets, rhyme royal, quatrains, etc., in diverse poetry.
