In the name of God

Leila Akbari

George Gordon(1788_1824)
Byron was descended from two aristocratic families both of them colorful violent and dissolute. his grandfather was an admiral nicknamed Foulweather Jack his great_uncle was the fifth Boron Byron,known to his rural neighbors as the Wicked Lordwho was tried by his peers for killing his kinsman William Chaworth in a drunken duel:his father captain John Byron was a rake and fortune hunter who rapidly dissipated the patrimony of two wealthy wives. Byron mother was a scotwoman. Catherine Gordon of Gight the last descendant of a line of lawless Scottish lairds.After her husband died she brought up her son in near poverty in Aberdeen were he was indoctrinated with the Calvinistic morality of Scottish Presbyterianism. Catherin Byron was an illeducated and almost pathologically

Irascible woman who nevertheless had an abiding love for her son they fought violently when together, but corresponded affectionately enough when apart, until her death in1811. when Byron was ten the death of his great uncle preceded by that of more immediate heirs to the title made him the 6th lord Byron. In a fashion suitable to his new eminence he was sent to Harrow school then to Trinity college cambridge. He had been born with a clubfoot which was made worse by inept medical treatment and this defect all his life caused him physical suffering and agonized embarrasment.

His lameness made him avid for athletic prowess he play cricket and made him an expert boxer,fencer,and horseman and a powerful swimmer.He was also sexually precocious when only seven he fell in love with a cousin Marry Duff and so violently that ten years later news of her marriage threw him into convulsion.

Both at cambridge and at his ancestral estate of Newstead he ingaged with more than oordinary zeal in the expensive pursuit and fashionable dissipation of a young regency lord. As a result despite a sizable and increasing income he got into financial difficulties from which he did not entirely extricate himself until late in his life. In the course of his schooling he formed many close friendship the most important with John Cam Hobhouse a sturdy political liberal and

Commonsense moralist who exerted a steadying influence throughout Byron turbulent life. Despite his distractions at the university Byron found time to try his hand at lyric verse some of which was published in1807 in a slim and conventional volume titled Hours of Idleness. This was treated with unmerited harshness by the pontifical Edinburgh Review and Byron was provoked to write in reply his first important poem English Bards and Scotch Reviewer,

a vigorous satire in the couplet style of the late 18th century followers of Pope in which he incorporate brilliant but tactless ridicule of all his major poetic contemporaries including Scott Wordsworth and coleridge.

After attaining his M.A degree and his majority Byron set out with Hobhouse in1809 on a tour through Portugal and Spain to Malta and then to little known Albania and Asia minor. He found himself besieged by women. He was extraordinarily handsom so beautiful a countenance Coleridge wrote I scarcely ever saw his eyes the open portals of the sun things of light and for light.

Because of a constitutional tendency to obesity however Byron was able to maintain his beauty only by recurring again and again to a starvation diet of biscuit ,soda water and strong cathartics. Often as a result of female initiative rather than his own Byron entered into a sequence of liaisons with ladies of fashion such as lady Caroline Lamb, Annabella Milbanke and half sister Augusta Leigh.

Byron had worked on a series of tragedies : Cain, Sardanapalus and Marino Faliero and on his superb satire The Vision of Judgment. But increasingly he devoted himself to the continuation of Dun Juan.

In his History of English of Literature written in the late 1850s the french critic Hippolyte Taine gave only a few condescending pages to Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and Keats and then devoted a long enthusiastic chapter to lord Byron The greatest and most English of these artists he is so great and so English that from him alone we shall learn more truths of his country and of his age than from all the rest together.

Through much of the19th century he continued to be rated as one of the greatest of English poets and the very prototype of literary Romanticism. His influence was felt everywhere not only among minor writers in the two or three decades after his death most European poets struck Byronic attitudes but among the major poets and novelists (including Goethe in Germany, Balzac and Stendhal in France, Pushkin and Dostoevsky in Russia, and Melville in America)

Painters (especially Delacroix ) and composers (especially Beethoven and Berlioz). Byron masterpiece Don Juan is an instance of that favorite neoclassic type, a satire against modern civilization and share many of the aims and methods of pope, swift, Voltaire and Sterne. Even Byron lyrics are old fashioned: many are in the 18th century gentlemanly made of witty extemporization and epigram (Written after swimming from Sestos to Abydos )

1812: Childe Harold, cantos 1and2 1813_14: the oriental tales including the Giaour, the Corsaire Lara 1816:separation from lady Byron, leaves England never to return 1818:Begins Don Juan 1823:Joins the Greek war for liberation from the Turks