GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON

an Introduction by Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities Yale University

The ultimate contrast in English poetry is between Byron and Shakespeare. Of Byron the passional man, we
know nearly everything, while of Shakespeare’s inwardness we know nothing. Shelley, a superb literary
critic, considered Byron’s Don Juan to be the great poem of the age, surpassing Goethe and Wordsworth.

Shelley, a superb literary critic, considered Byron’s Don Juan to be the great poem of the age, surpassing
Goethe and Wordsworth. Byron is the eternal archetype of the celebrity, the Napoleon of the realms of
rhyme.

In the two centuries since Byron died in Greece, leading a messy rebellion against the Turks (April 19, 1824,
aged thirty-six), only Shakespeare has been translated and read more, first in continental Europe and then
worldwide.

He bewildered and fascinated his contemporaries with a vitality overtly erotic, compounded of narcissism,
snobbery, sadomasochism, incest, heterosexual sodomy, homosexuality, what you will. Of the two authentic
English vices, humbuggery and bumbuggery, Byron scourged the first and expanded the horizons of the sec-
ond.

The first matter to bear in mind concerning Byron is his royal lineage, descended on his mother’s, the Gor-
don side, from Annabella Stuart, daughter of James I of Britain (James VI of Scotland, son of Mary, Queen
of Scots). The father was “Mad Jack” Byron, gambler and heroic womanizer, who had been guilty of incest
with his sister Frances. Their daughter, Lady Augusta Leigh, the poet’s half-sister, became his true beloved,
thus repeating the pattern.

Mad Jack died in France, poor and abandoned, when his poetical son was three. Born with a lame left foot,
George Gordon, Lord Byron, became a superb swimmer and marksman and, at ten, secured the family title
(when his great-uncle, who was posthumously labelled the "wicked" Lord Byron).

At Harrow the thirteen-year-old Lord Byron became a fierce boxer, while being inaugurated into that temple
of “fagging and flogging and homoerotic initiation” (the description by John Cam Hobhouse, the poet’s life-
time friend). This bisexual orientation continued at Trinity College, Cambridge, where Byron cherished a
grand passion for a choirboy, John Edleston.

In 1807, the nineteen-year-old Byron published Hours of Idleness, a lyric volume massively demolished in
The Edinburgh Review. Though he fought back in his English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers (1809), a verse
satire in the mode of Alexander Pope, the wound lasted. A grand tour of two years duration took him to Por -
tugal, Spain, Albania, Greece, Constantinople, and then Athens again. The final nine months of his life—
July 1823–April 1824—when he helped lead the Greeks in their war for independence against the Turks,
were overdetermined by his Athens sojourn, which transmuted him from a noble versifier into a major and
wildly popular poet. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Cantos I and II, published in March 1812, made him the
literary and social craze of Regency London. This is confessional poetry, self-obsessed, brutally nihilistic,
frequently slapdash, yet always refreshingly materialistic in the mode of Lucretius’s De rerum natura.
Byron’s Lucretianism later allied him to Shelley, but that difficult friendship with an intellectual and imagi-
native equal (the only one both poets ever enjoyed, and suffered) began during a three- month summer in
Geneva, 1816.

(…) Byron at fame’s peak [was] from 1812 to 1814, commencing with his inaugural speech in the House of
Lords, February, 1812, a month before Childe Harold’s publication. As an aristocratic Whig of the Holland
House set, the poet aptly chose to speak against the Tory government’s Framework Bill, which envisioned
death by hanging for the Nottingham Luddite weavers who had destroyed the machines replacing them.

Like Shelley, Byron was a poet on the Left, and revolution kindled his enthusiasm, but his concern for the
people is suspect. He grimly exploited the angry workers in the Lancashire coal pits he owned and expressed
no guilt, since his rage for expense invariably exceeded his high revenues. Karl Marx, whose daughter trans-
lated Shelley, looked back at the self-destructive careers of both Promethean rebels and shrewdly concluded
that Shelley the aristocrat always would have stood with the revolutionary Left but that Byron, had he been
able to bear survival into middle age (he proclaimed the best of life to be over at twenty-three), would have
sided with his hereditary nobility against the lower orders.

[From 1812 to 1819 Byron’s sexual, literary, and social dazzle in Whiggish London reached its peak]. Liter-
ally scores of noblewomen, married and not, offered themselves openly or in clandestine letters to the hero
of Childe Harold. These were glittering years of fame, love, and Whig society.

Marchand is particularly vivid on Byron’s erotic Waterloo, the superbly wild Lady Caroline Lamb, wife of
William Lamb, and later, as Lord Melbourne, one of Queen Victoria’s prime ministers (1834, 1835–1841).
After one glance at Byron, Lady Caroline fled home to describe him memorably in her journal: “mad—bad
—and dangerous to know,” a precise self-characterization. For not quite five months, their furiously public
love affair entertained and scandalized even uninhibited Whig society, until Byron, after many vacillations,
escaped for solace to the amiable and vastly experienced Lady Oxford, aged forty to his twenty-four. This
was socially acceptable but yielded soon to the start of his incestuous intimacy with his half-sister Lady
Augusta Leigh, well described by Marchand: “amoral as a rabbit and silly as a goose.”

Because of this predicament and his financial disasters, Byron understandably but crazily made his blindest
mistake. He earlier had proposed marriage to the wealthy Annabella Milbanke, who now finally accepted
him. The marriage lasted exactly a year, ending when Annabella left him, after the birth of their daughter,
Augusta Ada.

Soon after their marriage, the bride deduced the incestuous secret and soon enough endured fifteen days of
cohabitation with both her husband and his sister. A later visit by Augusta extended into two months, with
Byron’s behavior becoming maniacal, suggesting aspects of Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff, who was to be based
upon him. Abandoning Byron, Annabella sued, and Regency London turned savagely upon the bisexual, in-
cestuous, sodomistic poet it had celebrated. Legal separation between Lord and Lady Byron was formalized
in April, and the poet left England, never to return, on April 24, 1816.

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The most notorious of the major romantic poets, George Gordon, Lord Byron, was also one of the most
flamboyant personas and most fashionable dandies of his time. As the originator of the concept of the By-
ronic hero—a melancholy, brooding and defiant man, haunted by some secret guilt—his European reader-
ship consistently conflated the man with his writing. Byron represented a romantic myth: a member of the
aristocracy, he became a deist and a liberal in politics, who championed liberty and gave his money and fi-
nally his life for the cause of Greek independence.

His heart was buried in Missolonghi, while the rest of his remains were buried in Hucknell Torkard Church
near Newstead, as the deans of both Westminster Abbey and St. Paul’s had refused to receive his body. His
death, while supporting the push for Greek freedom, increased his popularity and furthered the myth of the
Byronic hero for generations of subsequent readers and admirers