Lord George Gordon Byron

George Gordon Byron was born on January 22, 1788 in Aberdeen, Scotland, and inherited his family's English title at the age of ten, becoming Baron Byron of Rochdale. “Abandoned by his father at an early age and resentful of his mother, who he blamed for his being born with a deformed foot, Byron isolated himself during his youth and was deeply unhappy. Though he was the heir to an idyllic estate, the property was run down and his family had no assets with which to care for it. As a teenager, Byron discovered that he was attracted to men as well as women, which made him all the more remote and secretive” (from: http://w ww.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/1562).

As we can read Poetry Foundation web, he was “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. His faceted personality found expression in satire, verse narrative, ode, lyric, speculative drama, historical tragedy, confessional poetry, dramatic monologue, seriocomic epic, and voluminous correspondence, written in Spenserian stanzas, heroic couplets, blank verse, terza rima, ottava rima, and vigorous prose. In his dynamism, sexuality, self-revelation, and demands for freedom for oppressed people everywhere, 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”. We can to guess thanks to his changebleness he had a great importance, due to his complete and different personality, passionate, irreverent and adventurous; and from his own concept of the “Byronic hero”.

The origin of this character is the Devil or Satan who until “the age of the American and French Revolutions, more than a century after Milton wrote Paradise Lost, did readers begin to sympathize with Satan in the war between Heaven and Hell, admiring him as the archrebel who had taken on no less an antagonist than Omnipotence itself, and even declaring him the true hero of the poem. In his ironic Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake claimed that Milton had unconsciously, but justly, sided with the Devil (representing rebellious energy) against Jehovah (representing oppressive limitation). Lecturing in 1818 on the history of English poetry, Hazlitt named Satan as “the most heroic subject that ever was chosen for a poem” and implied that the rebel angel’s Heaven-defying resistance was the mirror image of Milton’s own rebellion against political tyranny. A year later, Percy Shelley maintained that Satan is the moral superior to Milton’s tyrannical God, but he admitted that Satan’s greatness of character is flawed by vengefulness and pride. It was precisely this aspect of flawed grandeur, however, that made Satan so attractive a model for Shelley’s friend Byron in his projects of personal myth-making. The more immediate precedents of the Byronic hero—a figure that Byron uses for purposes both of self-revelation and of self-concealment" (extracted from: http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/romantic/topic_5/welcome.htm) .

The “Byronic hero”: a defiant, melancholy young man, brooding on some mysterious, who made something unforgivable in his past. A dark hero that would become the precedent of actual antihero whose some characteristics are: bipolar tendencies, he is in constant rebellion, with talent, self-critical and introspective, many times exiled or an outlaw, cynical and arrogant, often rejected by society and self-destructor. 

References:

-         http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/1562 - A poet web from the Academy of American poets.

-         http://www.englishverse.com/poets/byron_george_gordon - A site with English poems.

-        http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=81299 – The Poetry Foundation web, a good page with a lot of information about poets and different poems you can read.

-        http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/romantic/topic_5/welcome.htm – The Norton Anthology of English Literatura.