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The most flamboyant and notorious of the major Romantics, George Gordon, Lord Byron, was likewise the most fashionable poet of the day. 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.

Byron captivated the Western mind and heart as few writers have, stamping upon nineteenth-century letters, arts, politics, even clothing styles, his image and name as the embodiment of Romanticism.

#LordByron # Romantics #TodayInLiteraryHistory #BlindHorseBooks

PS A favorite stanza:

(Childe Harold, Canto iii. Stanzas 113, 114.)

I HAVE not loved the world, nor the world me;
I have not flatter’d its rank breath, nor bow’d   
To its idolatries a patient knee,—          
Nor coin’d my cheek to smiles,—nor cried aloud        
In worship of an echo; in the crowd               

They could not deem me one of such; I stood   
Among them, but not of them; in a shroud       
Of thoughts which were not their thoughts, and still could,   
Had I not filed my mind, which thus itself subdued.

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