Resources
Lord Byron (1788-1824) was a controversial British writer know for his flamboyant and exotic stories.
- Lord Byron (George Gordon): Poetry FoundationThe most flamboyant and notorious of the major English Romantic poets, George Gordon, Lord Byron, was likewise the most fashionable poet of the early 1800s. He created an immensely popular Romantic hero—defiant, melancholy, haunted by secret guilt—for which, to many, he seemed the model...
- Lord Byron: BritannicaLord Byron, in full George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, (born January 22, 1788, London, England—died April 19, 1824, Missolonghi, Greece), British Romantic poet and satirist whose poetry and personality captured the imagination of Europe. Renowned as the “gloomy egoist” of his autobiographical poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–18) in the 19th century, he is now more generally esteemed for the satiric realism of Don Juan (1819–24)...
Research & Reference
- Byron, George Gordon: Credo ReferenceAs a poet and failed man of action, Byron’s influence on European literature was more profound that that of any other English writer, except Sir Walter SCOTT, his friend. Those who benefited from studying him include Scott, Pushkin, Lermontov, Heine, Stendhal, and Espronceda. Only the most astute readers—first among them these six—recognized the supremacy of the facetious and far-reaching Don Juan, published in sixteen cantos from 1819 to 1824. The English literary establishment found little in him to admire, but Don Juan, once Byron had left John Murray and moved to the radical downmarket publisher John Hunt, found him an audience...
- Lord Byron: British LibraryDedicated to freedom of thought and action, and anarchic in his political views and personal morality, the poet and adventurer Lord Byron was the personification of the Romantic hero...
- Lord Byron: Historic UK‘Mad, bad and dangerous to know’. That is how Lady Caroline Lamb described her lover George Gordon Noel, sixth Baron Byron and one of the greatest Romantic poets in English literature...
Streaming Media
- The Glorious Romantics: Lord Byron, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe ShelleyA lover’s delight lay in the words of Lord Byron, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley as they caressed the English language with their poetic phrases. British actress Jean Marsh (Upstairs, Downstairs) complements a wonderful ensemble of actors in this essential collection of Romantic poetry. Performances of Keats’s poetry include “A thing of beauty is a joy forever,” “Who kill’d John Keats,” “Epistle to Charles Cowden Clarke,” “On the Grasshopper and Cricket,” “Fancy,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode to a Psyche,” “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles,” “Bright Star,” and “Adonais.” Performances of Byron’s poetry include “Abou Ben Adhem,” “Oh You, Who in All Names Can Tickle the Town,” “Written After Swimming from Sestos to Abydos,” “Maid of Athens, Ere We Part,” “The Girl of Cadiz,” “Jacqueline,” “A Joke Versified,” “Then must I plunge again into the crowd,” “Nay smile not at my sullen brow,” “Come hither, hither, my little page,” “Tis an old lesson,” and “On with the dance!” Performances of Shelley’s poetry include “Jenny Kissed Me,” “Alastor,” “From peak to peak the rattling crags among,” “Cristabel,” “This morn is up again…,” “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” “Love’s Philosophy,” “Ozymandias,” “The Isles of Greece, the Isles of Greece,” “Wealthy and dominion fade into the mass,” and “My Thoughts.” Starring Neil Hunt, Stephen Lang, Nicholas Woodeson, Jean Marsh, and John Neville-Andrews. Written by William Perry and directed by Marshall Jamison. As seen on PBS.
Perspectives
The Cambridge Companion to Byron
Byron's life and work have fascinated readers around the world for two hundred years, but it is the complex interaction between his art and his politics, beliefs and sexuality that has attracted so many modern critics and students. In three sections devoted to the historical, textual and literary contexts of Byron's life and times, these specially commissioned essays by a range of eminent Byron scholars provide a compelling picture of the diversity of Byron's writings. The essays cover topics such as Byron's interest in the East, his relationship to the publishing world, his attitudes to gender, his use of Shakespeare and eighteenth-century literature, and his acute fit in a post-modernist world. This Companion provides an invaluable resource for students and scholars, including a chronology and a guide to further reading.
Byron in Love
Acclaimed biographer of James Joyce Edna O'Brien has written an intimate biography that suits her fiery and charismatic subject. She follows Byron from the dissipations of Regency London to the wilds of Albania and the Socratic pleasures of Greece and Turkey, culminating in his meteoric rise to fame at the age of twenty-four on the publication of Childe Harold. With her prismatic eye and novelistic style, O'Brien eerily captures the spirit of the man and creates an indelible portrait of Byron that explodes the Romantic myth. From his escapades with John Edleston, the fourteen-year-old Cambridge choir boy, to those with a galaxy of women that included his half-sister, his wife of one year, and the Italian countess who forsook her satyr-like husband for "the peer of England and its greatest poet," Byron scandalized the world and inspires "Byronmania" to this day. Byron, as brilliantly rendered by O'Brien, is the poet as rebel, imaginative and lawless, and defiantly immortal.
Byron's Poetry
This volume offers a wide-ranging, comprehensive selection of Byron's poetry and prose.
Lady Byron Vindicated
A fascinating account of the separation of George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron and his wife Anne Isabella Noel Byron, 11th Baroness Wentworth and Baroness Byron, defending her role in the controversy.Lord Byron is best known as a poet, as well as being the father of the world's first computer programmer, Ada Countess of Lovelace.