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Byron

He woke up one morning in March 1812 and found himself famous. That was how he described it — "I awoke one morning and found myself famous" — and for once the self-dramatization was accurate. The publication of the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage made George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, the most celebrated poet in England and, quickly, in Europe. He was twenty-four years old. He had published his first collection of poems at eighteen, had spent the intervening years traveling through Portugal, Spain, Albania, and Greece, and had returned to England with the manuscript of a poem that would change how an entire civilization thought about the relationship between the self, romance, exile, and heroism. He would spend the next twelve years living up to the myth he had accidentally created — and creating, in the meantime, some of the most brilliant poetry in English literature.

George Gordon Byron was born on January 22, 1788, in London, with a congenital deformity of his right foot that caused him to walk with a limp throughout his life and that was a source of acute sensitivity and shame. His father, Captain "Mad Jack" Byron, was dissolute and died when his son was three. His mother, Catherine Gordon, was emotionally erratic, oscillating between indulgence and cruelty. He inherited the Byron title and the family estate, Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire, at age ten, when the fifth Baron Byron died. He attended Harrow School from 1801, where he was popular and athletic despite his disability, forming intense friendships and falling into the passionate attachments that would characterize his entire life. He went to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1805.

At Cambridge he accumulated debts, kept a bear in his rooms (the university banned dogs but not bears), and wrote poetry. In 1806, while still at Cambridge and eighteen years old, he privately printed his first collection, Fugitive Pieces, quickly suppressed it, and published a revised version, Poems on Various Occasions. The following year he produced Hours of Idleness, which was savaged in The Edinburgh Review. Byron responded with English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809), a ferocious satirical poem in heroic couplets that demonstrated, at twenty-one, a command of tone and rhetoric quite unlike anything in his earlier work. Then he left England for a two-year grand tour that took him through Portugal, Spain, Malta, Albania, Greece, and Turkey — swimming the Hellespont along the way, a feat he was immensely proud of. He came home in 1811 with the manuscript of Childe Harold.

The fame that followed the publication of Childe Harold in 1812 was of a scale and intensity that anticipates modern celebrity culture more than anything else in the Romantic period. Women threw themselves at him; men imitated his style; every fashionable hostess in London competed to have him at her dinner table. He produced the enormously popular "Oriental Tales" — The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair, Lara — at extraordinary speed, selling thousands of copies each. He had an affair with Lady Caroline Lamb, who famously called him "mad, bad, and dangerous to know." He married Annabella Milbanke in 1815; their daughter Ada, born that year, would become Ada Lovelace, the world's first computer programmer. The marriage collapsed after one year. Annabella separated from him citing cruelty and suspected insanity; rumors of an incestuous relationship with his half-sister Augusta also circulated. In 1816, facing social ruin, Byron left England for the last time.

In Switzerland that summer, he stayed on Lake Geneva with Percy and Mary Shelley and her stepsister Claire Clairmont — the summer that also produced Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. He then moved to Venice, where he lived with spectacular excess, kept a menagerie of animals, swam the Grand Canal, and wrote some of his greatest work: Beppo (1818), the third and fourth cantos of Childe Harold, Manfred, and the beginning of Don Juan (1819), his masterpiece — an epic comic poem of savage wit, lyrical beauty, and intellectual range that he continued writing until his death and never completed. He eventually settled in Pisa with the Shelley circle, then moved to Genoa. In 1823, fired by his lifelong love of Greece and the Greek cause for independence from Ottoman rule, he sailed to Missolonghi to join the Greek independence movement. He never fought in battle. He died there on April 19, 1824, of a fever compounded by the medical malpractice of his own doctors, who repeatedly bled him. He was thirty-six.

The Byronic hero — the brooding, charismatic, morally ambiguous exile who sets himself against society — became one of the most durable archetypes in Western culture, influencing everyone from Pushkin to the Brontes to the writers of the Gothic novel to the entire tradition of the literary anti-hero. In Greece, Byron is still a national hero; streets are named after him; his death is commemorated annually. He left behind a vast body of work and a legend that has never entirely subsided.