Scarica George Gordon Byron: Life, Works, and the Byronic Hero e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! GEORGE GORDON BYRON LIFE George Gordon Byron was born on 22 January 1788. On the death of his father, he became Lord Byron, the sixth Baron Byron of Rochdale. A handsome, aristocratic young man, he was, however, born with a handicap, a club foot, which led to unhappiness and isolation, but was seen by his contemporaries as a symbol of his Romantic spirit. In 1805 he went to Trinity College in Cambridge. He studied little and lived a debauched life. His first published collection of poems, Hours of Idleness, appeared in 1807. It was bitterly attacked in the Edinburgh Review and Byron avenged himself two years later with his satire English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. In 1809 he took his seat in the House of Lords, but soon after left on a tour of the Mediterranean, travelling with a friend to Portugal, Spain, Albania, Turkey and finally Athens. Byron settled in Greece for a time, studying the language and working on a poem, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, loosely based on his adventures. Byron returned to England in 1811 having completed the opening cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, a poem which tells the story of a world-weary young man looking for meaning in the world. When the first two cantos were published in 1812, the first edition sold out in three days. Byron reportedly said, “I awoke one morning and found myself famous”. Byron was politically engaged and used his popularity for public good, campaigning for workers’ rights and social reform. He also continued to publish Romantic tales in verse. His personal life, on the other hand, created no few problems. He had an incestuous relationship with his half-sister with whom he had a daughter. In 1815 he married Anne Isabella Milbanke, who gave him a daughter in the same year but then left him, accusing him of incest and homosexuality. Now ostracised by English society, Byron was forced to flee England and never to return. With the poet Shelley he travelled to Switzerland where he wrote the third canto of Childe Harold and then went to Italy, pursuing various love affairs, including a long relationship with Teresa Guiccioli in Venice and in Ravenna. He was a sympathiser with the revolutionary Carbonari movement. During his time in Italy he wrote Manfred (1817), the fourth canto of Childe Harold (1818) and began writing his masterpiece, Don Juan, an epic-satire novel in verse loosely based on a legendary hero. Byron also gave his support to the cause of Greek liberation from Turkish oppression. He organised an expedition but died of fever in 1824 in Missolonghi, at the age of 36. Don Juan was left unfinished, though 17 cantos had been written. His heart was buried in Greece where he is considered as a national hero. He himself was the great Romantic or “Byronic” hero. THE BYRONIC HERO In a letter from 1821, Byron wrote, “I can never get people to understand that poetry is the expression of excited passion, and that there is no such thing as a life of passion any more than a continuous earthquake, or an eternal fever.” 1
