There can be little doubt that he had strong bisexual tendencies, though relationships with women seem generally, but not always, to have satisfied his emotional needs more fully. He also formed the first of those passionate attachments with other, chiefly younger, boys that he would enjoy throughout his life before reaching his teen years he had been sexually initiated by his maid. He enjoyed the role of landed nobleman, proud of his coat of arms with its mermaid and chestnut horses surmounting the motto “Crede Byron” (“Trust Byron”).Īn “ebullition of passion” for his cousin Margaret Parker in 1800 inspired his “first dash into poetry.” From 1801 to 1805, he attended the Harrow School, where he excelled in oratory, wrote verse, and played sports. With the death in 1798 of his great-uncle, the “Wicked” fifth Lord Byron, George became the sixth Baron Byron of Rochdale, heir to Newstead Abbey, the family seat in Nottinghamshire. Early schooling instilled a devotion to reading and especially a “grand passion” for history that informed much of his later writing. From his Presbyterian nurse Byron developed a lifelong love for the Bible and an abiding fascination with the Calvinist doctrines of innate evil and predestined salvation. She was as likely to mock his lameness as to consult doctors about its correction. The profligate captain squandered his wife’s inheritance, was absent for the birth of his only son, and eventually decamped for France as an exile from English creditors, where he died in 1791 at 36.Įmotionally unstable, Catherine Byron raised her son in an atmosphere variously colored by her excessive tenderness, fierce temper, insensitivity, and pride. He was the son of Catherine Gordon of Gight, an impoverished Scots heiress, and Captain John (“Mad Jack”) Byron, a fortune-hunting widower with a daughter, Augusta. George Gordon Noel Byron was born, with a clubbed right foot, in London on January 22, 1788. In his dynamism, sexuality, self-revelation, and demands for freedom for oppressed people everywhere, Byron captivated the Western mind and heart as few writers have, stamping upon 19th-century letters, arts, politics, even clothing styles, his image and name as the embodiment of Romanticism. His faceted personality found expression in satire, verse narrative, ode, lyric, speculative drama, historical tragedy, confessional poetry, dramatic monologue, seriocomic epic, and voluminous correspondence, written in Spenserian stanzas, heroic couplets, blank verse, terza rima, ottava rima, and vigorous prose. He is also a Romantic paradox: a leader of the era’s poetic revolution, he named Alexander Pope as his master a worshiper of the ideal, he never lost touch with reality a deist and freethinker, he retained from his youth a Calvinist sense of original sin a peer of the realm, he championed liberty in his works and deeds, giving money, time, energy, and finally his life to the Greek war of independence. He created an immensely popular Romantic hero-defiant, melancholy, haunted by secret guilt-for which, to many, he seemed the model. The most flamboyant and notorious of the major English Romantic poets, George Gordon, Lord Byron, was likewise the most fashionable poet of the early 1800s.
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