Lord Byron
1788–1824
Biography
Lord Byron (1788–1824) was a British poet who was born George Gordon Byron and who succeeded as sixth Baron Byron while still a child. He is counted among the major figures of the Romantic movement and among the greatest British poets. He was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, but his life became as famous as his verse. Threats against him made England unsafe, so he travelled in Europe and spent about seven years in Italy, in Venice, Ravenna, Pisa and Genoa. There he was a friend of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.
In his last years Byron joined the Greek War of Independence against the Ottoman Empire, and Greeks still honour him as a folk hero for it. He died at Missolonghi in 1824, aged thirty-six, of a fever caught while the town was under siege. His death made him a symbol of liberty as well as of a restless, wounded personality.
His best-known works are Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, a long poem in Spenserian stanzas that follows a weary traveller through Europe and the Mediterranean, and Don Juan, a long satirical verse narrative that he never finished. On this site you can read both long poems. They show two sides of his talent: the grand, melancholy Romantic poet and the sharp, worldly wit that Don Juan displays.
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Books
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
by Lord Byron
Byron's Childe Harold, a world-weary young man, travels through Portugal, Spain, Greece, Italy and the Alps, and the narrator's meditations on ruins, battles and liberty become the poem. The first two cantos made Byron famous overnight in 1812, and the last two were written in…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.Don Juan
by Lord Byron
Byron's unfinished epic satire follows the young Don Juan from his Spanish boyhood through shipwreck, a Greek island, a Turkish harem, the Russian court and an English country house, with the narrator's digressions on poets, politics and love. This edition gives sixteen cantos…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.