Byron, George Gordon, Sixth Lord

(1788-1824)

   Educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge, Lord Byron inherited the title at the age of ten. By twenty-four he was among the most famous poets in England. Some say that his club foot influenced his character and drove him to excesses. His marriage in 1815 was not a happy one. Pursued by scandal and rumor, he left England and spent most of his short life in Italy, often in the company of Percy and Mary Shelley. He died of fever helping freedom fighters in Greece, and a commemorative stone is in Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey. He wrote passionate poems; his long poems included Childe Harolde's Pilgrimage in four cantos; he wrote short poems, challenging poems, and romantic poems, for example, She Walks in Beauty ('She' is Byron's cousin, Mrs. Wilmot.) Some of his other poems: "The Adieu," "At Thirty Years," "Beppo: A Venetian Story," "The Bride of Abydos," "By the Rivers of Babylon We Sat Down and Wept," "Elegy on Newstead Abbey," "The Age of Bronze," "The Butterfly," "The Chain I Gave," "The Destruction of Sennacherib," "When We Two Parted."

   Sources: Dictionary of National Biography. Electronic Edition 1.1. Oxford University Press, 1997. Encyclopædia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite DVD, 2006. English Poetry: Author Search. Chadwyck-Healey Ltd., 1995 (http://www.lib.utexas.edu:8080/search/epoetry/author. html). Encyclopedia of Britain. Bamber Gascoigne. London: Macmillan, 1994. The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.columbiagrangers.org). The National Portrait Gallery (www.npg.org.uk). The New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse. Jerome J. McGann. Oxford University Press, 1993. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th edition. Margaret Drabble, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000. The Poems of Byron. Paul E. More, ed. Houghton Mifflin, 1933. Westminster Abbey Official Guide (no date).