George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, FRS , commonly known as Lord Byron, was an English poet, peer, politician, and a leading figure in the Romantic movement. He is regarded as one of the greatest British poets and remains widely read and influential. Among his best-known works are the lengthy narrative poems, Don Juan and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, and the short lyric poem, "She Walks in Beauty".
He travelled extensively across Europe, especially in Italy, where he lived for seven years in Venice, Ravenna and Pisa, where he had a chance to frequent his friend the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Later in his brief life, Byron joined the Greek War of Independence fighting the Ottoman Empire, for which Greeks revere him as a national hero. He died in 1824 at the age of 36, from a fever contracted while in Missolonghi.
Often described as the most flamboyant and notorious of the major Romantics, Byron was both celebrated and castigated in life for his aristocratic excesses, including huge debts, numerous love affairs – with men as well as women, as well as rumours of a scandalous liaison with his half-sister – and self-imposed exile. His only legitimate child, Ada Lovelace, is regarded by some as the first computer programmer based on her notes for Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine. His illegitimate children include Allegra Byron, who died in childhood, and possibly, Elizabeth Medora Leigh.
“Send me no more reviews of any kind. — I will read no more of evil or good in that line.”
Walter Scott has not read a review of himself for thirteen years.
Letter to his publisher, John Murray (3 November 1821).
Fare Thee Well http://readytogoebooks.com/LB-FTW46.htm, st. 1 (1816).
the horse was brought;
In truth, he was a noble steed,
A Tartar of the Ukraine breed,
Who look'd as though the speed of thought
Were in his limbs.
Mazeppa http://readytogoebooks.com/MZP21.htm (1819), stanza 9.
Letter to Thomas Moore (22 June 1821).
shall yet be happy.
Assyria is not all the earth—we'll find
A world out of our own — and be more bless'd
Than I have ever been, or thou, with all
An empire to indulge thee.
Act IV, scene 1.
Sardanapalus (1821)
