19th Century British Poetry

George Gordon Byron was born near Aberdeen, Scotland, to dissolute aristocratic parents who had fallen on hard times. Their difficulties were alleviated when Byron inherited his title at age of ten. Upon graduation from Trinity College, Cambridge, he embarked on a two-year tour of Portugal, Spain, Malta, Greece, and Asia-Minor, during which he gathered much of the material for his most important poems. He became a celebrity overnight in 1812 with the publication of his first collection of poems, but notoriety supplanted fame when Byron’s affair with his half-sister, whom he had met as an adult, became public knowledge. His marriage collapsed and he was forced to leave England in 1816. He followed the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley to Geneva and Italy, then went on to Greece where he organized a contingent of soldiers to fight for independence from the Turks. After he fell sick in the woods during a training exercise and died, he was mourned as a national hero throughout Greece. His work was widely known in Europe and was immensely influential on the major European writers of his day. Perhaps his most significant contribution to literature was the development of the Byronic hero, a doomed but impassioned wanderer, often driven by guilt and alienated from his society, but superior to it. Byron’s work was deeply rooted in the literary tradition; he turned to the past for models, drawing heavily on the Cavalier tradition of paying elaborate compliments to ladies, the satiric tradition of launching witty criticism of modern civilizations, and the narrative tradition. In Don Juan, his masterpiece, he uses the narrator to attack such institutions as the government, the church, and marriage; criticize such vices as hypocrisy, greed, and lust; and subtly extol such virtues as courage, loyalty, and candor. Although many critics considered the poem a wanton celebration of the misadventures of profligate, Byron himself called it “the most moral or poems.” His formal achievement was great. He worked with apparent facility in established meters, such as blank verse, terza-rima, and ottava-rima, and elaborate forms such as the ode and the Spenserian stanza. From The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 4th Edition.