Lord Byron’s Influences:



Lord Byron’s Influences:

George Gordon Noel Byron, 6th Baron Byron, was born 22 January 1788 in London and died 19 April 1824 in Missolonghi, Greece. He was among the most famous of the English 'Romantic' poets; his contemporaries included Percy Shelley and John Keats. He was also a satirist whose poetry and personality captured the imagination of Europe.

As a child he was taken by his mother, Catherine Gordon, to Aberdeen, Scotland, where he attended to grammar school there. He was extremely sensitive of his lameness; its effect upon his character was obvious enough. It was rumored that his nurse, May Gray, made physical advances to him when he was only nine. This experience and his idealized love for his distant cousins Mary Duff and Margaret Parker shaped his paradoxical attitudes toward women in his life and poems.

At the age of 10, having inherited the title and estates of his great-uncle, the "wicked" Lord Byron, he started living in Newstead Abbey, place that captivated him. He was privately tutored in Nottingham and his clubfoot was doctored by a quack named Lavender. Later on John Hanson, Mrs. Byron’s attorney, rescued him from the pernicious influence of May Gray, the tortures of Lavender, and the increasingly uneven temper of his mother. Hanson took him to London, where a reputable doctor prescribed a special brace, and in the autumn of 1799 Hanson sent him to a school in Dulwich. There, the master, Dr Glennie, perceived that the boy like reading for its own sake and gave him the free run of his library. He read a set of the British Poets from beginning to end more than once. This, too, was an initiation and a preparation.

In 1801 Byron went to Harrow, where his friendships with younger boys fostered a romantic attachment to the school. He learned enough Latin and Greek to make him a classic, if not a classical scholar, and he made friends with his equals and superiors. He learned something of his own worth and of the worth of others. "My school-friendships," he says, "were with me passions." Two of his closest friends died young, and from Lord Clare, whom he loved best of all, he was separated by chance and circumstance. He was an odd mixture, now lying dreaming on his favourite tombstone in the churchyard, now the ring-leader in whatever mischief was afoot. It is possible that these friendships gave the first impetus to his sexual ambivalence, which became more pronounced at Cambridge and later in Greece, by the time he started writting his first poems. In fact, Byron’s sojourn in Greece made a lasting impression on his mind and character - he delighted in the sunshine and moral tolerance of the people.  After leaving, he often spoke longingly of his visit - and his desire to return. He spent the summer of 1803 with his mother at Southwell, near Nottingham, but soon escaped to Newstead and stayed with his tenant, Lord Grey, and courted his distant cousin Mary Chaworth, who became the symbol of idealized and unattainable love. 

After a term at Trinity College, Byron indulged in dissipation and undue generosity in London that put him deeply into debt. He returned in the summer of 1806 to Southwell, where he gathered his early poems in a volume privately printed in November with the title Fugitive Pieces.  The following June his first published poems, Hours of Idleness, appeared.  When he returned to Trinity he formed a close friendship with John Cam Hobhouse, who stirred his interest in liberal Whiggism. At the beginning of 1808, he entered into "an abyss of sensuality" in London that threatened to undermine his health. On reaching his majority in January 1809, he took his seat in the House of Lords, published an anonymous satire, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, and embarked with Hobhouse on a grand tour.

The agitation of the affairs he lived throughtout and the sense of mingled guilt and exultation they aroused in his mind are reflected in the Oriental tales.

Byron's work was a synthesis of medieval and classical inspiration with a modern sensibility. A fascination with Europe's tempestous, mysterious medieval roots was current at the time, as it still was when the Pre-Raphaelites - who rejected the Renaissance and embraced Medieval times, sick of the pretentious conventionality of theVictorian era - became popular. Like Sir Walter Scott, who was equally enamored of the medieval times, Byron found the romantic notions of Napoleon very appealing. (Byron was Napoleonic to the end, even having his carriage made as a replica of Bonaparte's.)

Lord Byron forms part of the "Second generation" of Romantic Poets, including Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley and John Keats. Byron however, was still influenced by 18th-century satirists and was, perhaps the least 'romantic' of the three. His amours with a number of prominent but married ladies was also a way to voice his dissent on the hypocrisy of a high society that was only apparently religious but in fact largely libertine, the same that had derided him for being physically impaired. His first trip to Europe resulted in the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, a mock-heroic epic of a young man's adventures in Europe but also a sharp satire against English society. Despite Childe Harold's success on his return to England, accompanied by the publication of The Giaour and The Corsair his alleged incestuous affair with his half-sister Augusta Leigh in 1816 actually forced him to leave England for good and seek asylum on the continent. Here he joined Percy Bysshe Shelley, his wife Mary, with his secretary John Polidori on the shores of Lake Geneva in 1816.

Although his is just a short story, Polidori must be credited for introducing The Vampyre to English literature. Percy, like Mary, had much in common with Byron: he was an aristocrat from a famous and ancient family, had embraced atheism and free-thinking and, like him, was fleeing from scandal in England.

Probably John Keats does not share Byron’s and Shelley's extremely revolutionary ideals, but his cult of pantheism is as important as Shelley's. Keats was in love with the ancient stones of the Parthenon that Lord Elgin had brought to England from Greece, also known as the Elgin Marbles). He celebrates ancient Greece: the beauty of free, youthful love couples here with that of classical art. Keats's great attention to art, especially in his Ode on a Grecian Urn is quite new in romanticism, and it will inspire Walter Pater's and then Oscar Wilde's belief in the absolute value of art as independent from aesthetics.

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