Lord Byron

Copyright Michael D. Robbins 2005

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Lord Byron (George Gordon)—Poet

(1788-1824) January 22, 1788, London, England, 2:00 PM, LMT. (Source: family birth records in the British Museum; also Notable Nativities and Andre Barabult) Died, of malaria and profuse bleeding, April 19, 1824, Missolonghi, Greece.

(Ascendant Cancer with Mars rising retrograde in Cancer, and Juno, retrograde, also in Cancer conjunct the Ascendant; Moon and Uranus are also in Cancer, conjuncted; Sun in Aquarius with Saturn conjuncted to Venus, both in Aquarius; Pluto also in Aquarius; Mercury in Capricorn; Jupiter, retrograde, in Capricorn; Neptune, retrograde, in Libra; Chiron and Vesta, both retrograde, conjuncted in Gemini; MC in the last degree of Aquarius, thus needing examination; NN in Sagittarius)

Born with a clubfoot; raised by an erratic mother after his father's death when he was age 3. Poor student but an avid reader. First poems published in 1806. Praised after 1812 as one of the great English Romantic Poets. (1788-1824)    

Romantic Hero. George Gordon, Lord Byron, was one of England’s leading poets. He sympathized with radical causes and offered go join the Greek rebels in 1823. He wrote and campaigned to raise support for them in the rest of Europe, sailed to Greece, and died there of malaria in 1824. In Greece, and among liberals throughout Europe, he became revered as a symbol of the romantic life and the love of freedom.

 

 

A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't know.

A man of eighty has outlived probably three new schools of painting, two of architecture and poetry and a hundred in dress.

A mistress never is nor can be a friend. While you agree, you are lovers; and when it is over, anything but friends.

A woman should never be seen eating or drinking, unless it be lobster salad and Champagne, the only true feminine and becoming viands.

Absence - that common cure of love.

Adversity is the first path to truth.

Death, so called, is a thing which makes men weep, And yet a third of life is passed in sleep.

Every day confirms my opinion on the superiority of a vicious life - and if Virtue is not its own reward I don't know any other stipend annexed to it.

Fame is the thirst of youth.

Folly loves the martyrdom of fame.

Fools are my theme, let satire be my song.

For in itself a thought, a slumbering thought, is capable of years, and curdles a long life into one hour.

For pleasures past I do not grieve, nor perils gathering near; My greatest grief is that I leave nothing that claims a tear.

For truth is always strange; stranger than fiction.

Friendship is Love without his wings!

Her great merit is finding out mine - there is nothing so amiable as discernment.

I am about to be married, and am of course in all the misery of a man in pursuit of happiness.

I am acquainted with no immaterial sensuality so delightful as good acting.

I am always most religious upon a sunshiny day.

I cannot help thinking that the menace of Hell makes as many devils as the severe penal codes of inhuman humanity make villains.

I do detest everything which is not perfectly mutual.

I have great hopes that we shall love each other all our lives as much as if we had never married at all.

I have had, and may have still, a thousand friends, as they are called, in life, who are like one's partners in the waltz of this world -not much remembered when the ball is over.

I have no consistency, except in politics; and that probably arises from my indifference to the subject altogether.

I know that two and two make four - and should be glad to prove it too if I could - though I must say if by any sort of process I could convert 2 and 2 into five it would give me much greater pleasure.

I love not man the less, but Nature more.

I only go out to get me a fresh appetite for being alone.

I should be very willing to redress men wrongs, and rather check than punish crimes, had not Cervantes, in that all too true tale of Quixote, shown how all such efforts fail.

I would rather have a nod from an American, than a snuff-box from an emperor.

If I could always read, I should never feel the want of company.

If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad.

In solitude, where we are least alone.

It is odd but agitation or contest of any kind gives a rebound to my spirits and sets me up for a time.

It is useless to tell one not to reason but to believe -you might as well tell a man not to wake but sleep.

It is very certain that the desire of life prolongs it.

John Adams lies here, of the parish of Southwell, a carrier who carried his can to his mouth well; he carried so much, and he carried so fast, he could carry no more - so was carried at last; for the liquor he drank, being too much for one, he could not carry off - so he's now carri-on.

Keep thy smooth words and juggling homilies for those who know thee not.

Let none think to fly the danger for soon or late love is his own avenger.

Let these describe the indescribable.

Life's enchanted cup sparkles near the brim.

Like the measles, love is most dangerous when it comes late in life.

Lovers may be - and indeed generally are - enemies, but they never can be friends, because there must always be a spice of jealousy and a something of Self in all their speculations.

Man is born passionate of body, but with an innate though secret tendency to the love of Good in his main-spring of Mind. But God help us all! It is at present a sad jar of atoms.

Man, being reasonable, must get drunk; the best of life is but intoxication.

Man's love is of man's life a part; it is a woman's whole existence. In her first passion, a woman loves her lover, in all the others all she loves is love.

Men are the sport of circumstances when it seems circumstances are the sport of men.

Men love in haste, but they detest at leisure.

Men think highly of those who rise rapidly in the world; whereas nothing rises quicker than dust, straw, and feathers.

My attachment has neither the blindness of the beginning, nor the microscopic accuracy of the close of such liaisons.

My turn of mind is so given to taking things in the absurd point of view, that it breaks out in spite of me every now and then.

No ear can hear nor tongue can tell the tortures of the inward hell!

One certainly has a soul; but how it came to allow itself to be enclosed in a body is more than I can imagine. I only know if once mine gets out, I'll have a bit of a tussle before I let it get in again to that of any other.

Opinions are made to be changed -or how is truth to be got at?

Out of chaos God made a world, and out of high passions comes a people.

Posterity will never survey a nobler grave than this: here lie the bones of Castlereagh: stop, traveler, and piss.

Prolonged endurance tames the bold.

Ready money is Aladdin's lamp.

Roll on, deep and dark blue ocean, roll. Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain. Man marks the earth with ruin, but his control stops with the shore.

Society is now one polished horde, formed of two mighty tries, the Bores and Bored.

Sometimes we are less unhappy in being deceived by those we love, than in being undeceived by them.

Sorrow is knowledge, those that know the most must mourn the deepest, the tree of knowledge is not the tree of life.

Switzerland is a curst, selfish, swinish country of brutes, placed in the most romantic region of the world.

The 'good old times' - all times when old are good.

The beginning of atonement is the sense of its necessity.

The best way will be to avoid each other without appearing to do so - or if we jostle, at any rate not to bite.

The busy have no time for tears.

The Cardinal is at his wit's end - it is true that he had not far to go.

The dead have been awakened - shall I sleep? The world's at war with tyrants - shall I crouch? the harvest's ripe - and shall I pause to reap? I slumber not; the thorn is in my couch; Each day a trumpet soundeth in mine ear, its echo in my heart.

The dew of compassion is a tear.

The king-times are fast finishing. There will be blood shed like water, and tears like mist; but the peoples will conquer in the end. I shall not live to see it, but I foresee it.

The place is very well and quiet and the children only scream in a low voice.

The poor dog, in life the firmest friend. The first to welcome, foremost to defend.

The power of Thought, the magic of the Mind!

There is no instinct like that of the heart.

There is something pagan in me that I cannot shake off. In short, I deny nothing, but doubt everything.

There's naught, no doubt, so much the spirit calms as rum and true religion.

They never fail who die in a great cause.

This is the patent age of new inventions for killing bodies, and for saving souls. All propagated with the best intentions.

Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who cannot, are fools, and those who dare not, are slaves.

Though sages may pour out their wisdom's treasure, there is no sterner moralist than pleasure.

'Tis pleasant, sure, to see one's name in print. A book's a book, although there's nothing in 't.

'Tis very certain the desire of life prolongs it.

To have joy one must share it. Happiness was born a twin.

To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.

Truth is always strange, stranger than fiction.

We are all selfish and I no more trust myself than others with a good motive.

What is the worst of woes that wait on age? What stamps the wrinkle deeper on the brow? To view each loved one blotted from life's page, And be alone on earth, as I am now.

Where there is mystery, it is generally suspected there must also be evil.

Why I came here, I know not; where I shall go it is useless to inquire - in the midst of myriads of the living and the dead worlds, stars, systems, infinity, why should I be anxious about an atom?

Yes, love indeed is light from heaven; A spark of that immortal fire with angels shared, by Allah given to lift from earth our low desire.

Yet, Freedom! yet thy banner, torn, but flying, streams like the thunderstorm against the wind.

Your letter of excuses has arrived. I receive the letter but do not admit the excuses except in courtesy, as when a man treads on your toes and begs your pardon - the pardon is granted, but the joint aches, especially if there is a corn upon it.

 

George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron
Anglo-Scottish poetGeorge Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron (January 22, 1788–April 19, 1824) was an Anglo-Scottish poet and a leading figure in Romanticism. Among his best-known works are the narrative poems Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Don Juan. The latter remained incomplete on his death. He was regarded as one of the greatest European poets, and is still widely read.

Byron's fame rests not only on his writings, but also on his life, which featured extravagant living, numerous love affairs, debts, separation, allegations of incest and sodomy and an eventual death from fever after he travelled to fight on the Greek side in the Greek War of Independence; for which he is a Greek national hero.

He was famously described by Lady Caroline Lamb as "mad, bad, and dangerous to know." He is also notable for his daughter, Ada Lovelace.

Byron had two last names (in addition to his title); but only one at any given time. He was born George Gordon Byron; at age ten, he inherited the family title, becoming George Gordon (Byron), Baron of Rochdale. When his mother-in-law died, her will required that he change his surname to Noel in order to inherit half her estate. (It would have been more usual to hyphenate to Byron-Noel - as his grandsons changed from King to King-Noel; but his in-laws had come to hate the name of Byron.) He was thereafter George Gordon Noel, Lord Byron. He then signed himself "Noel Byron", and boasted of having the same initials as Napoleon Bonaparte. Gordon was a baptismal name, not a surname (his mother had been a Gordon); Wentworth was Lady Byron's eventual title, not a surname (the Noels had inherited it from the Wentworths in 1745).

Catherine Gordon, Byron's motherByron was born in London, the son of Captain John "Mad Jack" Byron and of John's second wife Lady Catherine Gordon, heiress of Gight, Aberdeenshire. His paternal grandfather was Vice-Admiral John "Foulweather Jack" Byron, who had circumnavigated the globe, and was younger brother of William Byron, 5th Baron Byron, known as "the Wicked Lord". He is one of the descendents of King Edward III of England. [1]

From Byron's birth he suffered from a malformation of the right foot, causing a slight lameness, which was a cause of lifelong misery to him, aggravated by the knowledge that with proper care it might have been cured. He was christened George Gordon after his maternal grandfather, George Gordon, 12th Laird of Gight, a descendant of James I. This grandfather committed suicide in 1779. Byron's mother Catherine had to sell her land and title to pay her father's debts. John Byron may have married Catherine for her money and, after squandering it, deserted her. Byron's parents separated before his birth. Lady Catherine moved back to Scotland shortly afterwards, where she raised her son in Aberdeen until May 21, 1798, when the death of his great-uncle made him the sixth Baron Byron, inheriting Newstead Abbey, rented to Henry Edward Yelverton, 19th Baron Grey de Ruthyn during Byron's adolescence.

He received his formal education at Aberdeen Grammar School. In 1801 he was sent to Harrow, where he remained until 1805, when he proceeded to Trinity College, Cambridge. There he met and shortly fell deeply in love with a fifteen year old choirboy by the name of John Edleston. About his "protégé" he wrote, " He has been my almost constant associate since October, 1805, when I entered Trinity College. His voice first attracted my attention, his countenance fixed it, and his manners attached me to him for ever." Later, upon learning of his friend's death, he wrote, "I have heard of a death the other day that shocked me more than any, of one whom I loved more than any, of one whom I loved more than I ever loved a living thing, and one who, I believe, loved me to the last." In his memory Byron composed Thyrza, a series of elegies, in which he changed the pronouns from masculine to feminine so as not to offend sensibilities.

From 1809 to 1811, Byron went on the Grand Tour then customary for a young nobleman. Because of the Napoleonic Wars, he was forced to avoid most of Europe and instead turned to the Orient, which had fascinated him from a young age anyway. Correspondence between his circle of Cambridge friends also makes clear that a key motive was the hope of homosexual experience. He travelled from England over Spain to Albania and spent a lot of time there and in Athens. While in Athens he had a torrid love affair with Nicolò Giraud, a boy of fifteen or sixteen who taught him Italian. In gratitude for the boy's love Byron sent him to school at a monastery in Malta and bequeathed him seven thousand pounds sterling – almost double what he was later to spend refitting the Greek fleet. For most of the trip, he had a travelling companion in his friend John Cam Hobhouse. On this tour, the first two cantos of his epic poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage were written.

Some early verses which he had published in 1806 were suppressed. They were followed in 1807 by Hours of Idleness, which was savagely attacked in the Calvinist Edinburgh Review. In reply he sent forth English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809), which created considerable stir and shortly went through 5 editions.

After his return from his travels, the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage were published in 1812, and were received with acclamation. In his own words, "I awoke one morning and found myself famous." He followed up his success with four equally celebrated Oriental Tales, The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair, and Lara which established the Byronic hero. About the same time began his intimacy with his future biographer, Thomas Moore.

Byron eventually took his seat at the House of Lords in 1811 shortly after his return from the Levant and made his first speech there on February 27, 1812. He was a strong advocate of social reform, and was particularly noted as one of the few Parliamentary defenders of the Luddites. He was also a defender of Roman Catholics. Byron was inspired to write political poems such as "Song for the Luddites" (1816) and "The Landlords' Interest" (1823). Examples of poems where he attacked his political opponents include "Wellington: The Best of the Cut-Throats" (1819) and "The Intellectual Eunuch Castlereagh" (1818).

Affairs and scandalscut a sexual swathe that still astonishes by its sheer brazenness and multiplicity - he once bragged that he had sex with 250 women in Venice over the course of a single year. He was all-inclusive - boys, siblings, women of all classes. Ultimately he was to live abroad to escape the censure of British society, where men could be forgiven for sexual misbehaviour only up to a point, one which Byron far surpassed.

In an early scandal, Byron embarked in 1812 on a well-publicised affair with Lady Caroline Lamb. Byron eventually broke off the relationship, and Lamb never entirely recovered.

As a child, Byron had seen little of his half-sister Augusta Leigh; in adulthood, he formed a close relationship with her that has widely been interpreted as incestuous. Augusta had been separated from her husband since 1811 when she gave birth on April 15, 1814 to a daughter, Medora. The extent of Byron's joy over the birth has been construed as evidence that he was Medora's father, a theory reinforced by the many passionate poems he wrote to Augusta.

Eventually Byron began to court Caroline Lamb's cousin Anne Isabella Milbanke ("Annabella"), who refused his first proposal of marriage but later relented. They married at Seaham Hall, County Durham on January 2, 1815. The marriage proved unhappy. He treated her poorly and showed disappointment at the birth of a daughter (Augusta Ada), rather than a son. On January 16, 1816, Lady Byron left George, taking Ada with her. On April 21, Byron signed the Deed of Separation. Rumours of marital violence, adultery with actresses, incest with Augusta, and sodomy were circulated, assisted by a jealous Lady Caroline. In a letter, Augusta quoted him as saying: "Even to have such a thing said is utter destruction & ruin to a man from which he can never recover."

After this break-up of his domestic life, Byron again left England, as it turned out, forever. Byron passed through Belgium and up the Rhine; in the summer of 1816 Lord Byron and his personal physician, John William Polidori settled in Switzerland, at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva. There he became friends with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Shelley's wife-to-be Mary Godwin. He was also joined by Mary's step-sister, Claire Clairmont, with whom he had had an affair in London. Byron initially refused to have anything to do with Claire, and would only agree to remain in her presence with the Shelleys, who eventually persuaded Byron to accept and provide for Allegra, the child she bore him in January 1817.

At the Villa Diodati, kept indoors by the "incessant rain" of that "wet, ungenial summer", over three days in June the five turned to reading fantastical stories, including "Fantasmagoriana" (in the French edition), and then devising their own tales. Mary Shelley produced what would become Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus and Polidori was inspired by a fragmentary story of Byron's to produce The Vampyre, the progenitor of the romantic vampire genre. Byron's story fragment was published as a postscript to Mazeppa; he also wrote the third canto of Childe Harold. Byron wintered in Venice, but in 1817 he journeyed to Rome, whence returning to Venice he wrote the fourth canto of Childe Harold. About the same time he sold Newstead and published Manfred, Cain, and The Deformed Transformed. The first five cantos of Don Juan were written between 1818 and 1820, during which period he made the acquaintance of the Countess Guiccioli, whom soon separated from her husband. It was about this time that he received a visit from Moore, to whom he confided his autobiography, which Moore, in the exercise of the discretion left to him, burned in 1824.

In 1821-22 he finished cantos 6-12 of Don Juan at Pisa, and in the same year he joined with Leigh Hunt in starting a short-lived newspaper, The Liberal, in the first number of which appeared The Vision of Judgment. His last Italian home was Genoa, where he was still accompanied by the Countess, and where he lived until 1823, when he offered himself as an ally to the Greek insurgents. By 1823 Byron had grown bored with his life in Genoa and with his mistress, the Contessa Guiccioli. When the representatives of the movement for Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire contacted him to ask for his support, he accepted. On July 16, Byron left Genoa on the Hercules, arriving at Kefalonia in the Ionian Islands on August 4. He spent £4000 of his own money to refit the Greek fleet, then sailed for Messolonghi in western Greece, arriving on December 29 to join Prince Alexandros Mavrokordatos, leader of the Greek rebel forces.

Mavrokordatos and Byron planned to attack the Turkish-held fortress of Lepanto, at the mouth of the Gulf of Corinth. Byron employed a fire-master to prepare artillery and took part of the rebel army under his own command and pay, despite his lack of military experience, but before the expedition could sail, on February 15 1824, he fell ill, and the usual remedy of bleeding weakened him further. He made a partial recovery, but in early April he caught a violent cold which the bleeding -- insisted on by his doctors -- aggravated. The cold became a violent fever, and he died on April 19.

on his deathbed as depicted by Joseph-Denis Odevaere c.1826 Oil on canvas, 166 x 234,5 cm Groeninge Museum, Bruges. Note the sheet covering his mishapen right foot.The Greeks mourned Lord Byron deeply, and he became a national hero. (Viron), the Greek form of "Byron", continues in popularity as a masculine name in Greece, and a suburb of Athens is called Vironas in his honour. His body was embalmed and his heart buried under a tree in Messolonghi. His remains were sent to England for burial in Westminster Abbey, but the Abbey refused. He is buried at the Church of St. Mary Magdalene in Hucknall, Nottingham. At her request, Ada, the child he never knew, was buried next to him. In later years, the Abbey allowed a duplicate of a marble slab given by the King of Greece, which is laid directly above Byron's grave. In 1969, 145 years after Byron's death, a memorial to him was finally placed in Westminster Abbey.

Upon his death, the barony passed to a cousin, George Anson Byron (1789–1868), a career military officer and Byron's polar opposite in temperament and lifestyle.

Byron wrote prolifically.[2] In 1833 his publisher, John Murray, released the complete works in 17 octavo volumes, including a life by Thomas Moore. His magnum opus, Don Juan, a poem spanning 17 cantos, ranks as one of the most important long poems published in England since Milton's Paradise Lost. Don Juan, Byron's masterpiece, often called the epic of its time, has roots deep in literary tradition and, although regarded by early Victorians as somewhat shocking, equally involves itself with its own contemporary world at all levels – social, political, literary and ideological.

(1803), as painted by Marie Louise Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun.The Byronic hero pervades much of Byron's work. Scholars have traced the literary history of the Byronic hero from Milton, and many authors and artists of the Romantic movement show Byron's influence -- during the 19th century and beyond. The Byronic hero presents an idealised but flawed character whose attributes include:

Character, by all accounts, had a particularly magnetic personality – one may say astonishingly so. He obtained a reputation as being unconventional, eccentric, flamboyant and controversial. He was given to extremes of temper. Byron had a great fondness for animals, most famously for a Newfoundland dog named Boatswain; when Boatswain contracted rabies, Byron reportedly nursed him without any fear of becoming bitten and infected. Boatswain lies buried at Newstead Abbey and has a monument larger than his master's.

The life of Byron has been the source of endless anecdotes, from his own time to ours. His character, wit, and charm were impressed upon virtually everyone who met him. Beyond the opinions of others, however, one can know Byron on a personal level - through the letters and journals which chronicle every aspect of his life in his own words. These personal writings possess all the immediate force and vitality of his poetry.

There is a selection of journal entries and letters at my site. And luckily for internet users, Jeffrey Hoeper has collected and scanned most of Byron's letters and journals at his site. This is a wonderful resource for students and Byron enthusiasts. You can also read EH Coleridge's lengthy 1905 biography of Byron at the site.