Byron Poetry

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. He created an immensely
popular Romantic hero—defiant, melancholy, haunted by secret guilt—for which, to many, he
seemed the model. 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. 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. 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.