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 TODAY’S LITERARY BIRTHDAY:
Lord Byron, English Romantic poet.
(born 1788)


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. 

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.

  I have not loved the world, nor the world me,—           
  But let us part fair foes; I do believe,    
  Though I have found them not, that there may be    
  Words which are things,—hopes which will not deceive,    
  And virtues which are merciful, nor weave    
  Snares for the failing: I would also deem           
  O’er others’ griefs that some sincerely grieve;    
  That two, or one, are almost what they seem,—    
That goodness is no name, and happiness no dream.    


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