… or “mad, bad and dangerous to know”, as Lady Caroline Lamb—one of his lovers—described him?

Last April marked the bicentenary of Lord Byron’s death in Missolonghi, Greece, where the poet is still remembered as a national hero: a lifelong supporter of liberal causes, in 1823 he joined the Greeks in their fight against Ottoman rule. Among the events organized to commemorate the life and work of this flamboyant poet, I had the opportunity, last July, to visit an exhibition in the Wren Library (at Trinity College, Cambridge). I saw a display of illustrations of Don Juan, Byron’s masterpiece, which had been commissioned by the College as part of their commemoration, to reflect on the place of Byron’s poems in the modern world. Back home, I felt that time had come for me to approach this literary monument!

Certainly the most dashing of the British Romantic poets, brilliant and charismatic, Byron seems to remain today more notorious for his life—as a political revolutionary, sexual adventurer and traveller—than for his literary work. Once the darling of London’s society after the publication of the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in 1812, he left Britain under a cloud in 1816 and never returned to his homeland. If he enjoyed during his lifetime a tremendous fame as a writer, only a generation later in the 19^th century, some critics were asserting that Byron was not a “true poet”! How could such a change have happened within a few decades? And what is Byron’s legacy in today’s literary world?

In the document below, you will find an introduction to Byron’s work and biography, including some of his portraits and relevant extracts from his main poems. I also mentioned some interesting resources I used, such as a short selection of literary criticism about Byron’s work, and a few YouTube links to relevant films and lectures. As the volume of biographies and literary criticism about Lord Byron’s work is even more frightening than the bulk of the poet’s writings, the purpose of this introduction is not to present the quintessence of encyclopaedia’s articles or books’ introductions about Byron, but merely to share with you some information concerning this larger-than-life personality, which touched me and led me to open Don Juan and an edition of Byron’s Selected Poems. And I did not regret it: if I was sometimes moved by some lyrical or more intimate passages, I also laughed a lot when I read his witty and biting satire of his contemporary society in his later works.

Illustration on top of this post: Portrait of Lord Byron by Jean-Baptiste Mauzaisse (1784-1844), via Wikimedia Commons.