![]() He was christened "George Gordon Byron" at St Marylebone Parish Church after his maternal grandfather, George Gordon of Gight, a descendant of James I of Scotland, who had committed suicide in 1779. Vice Admiral John Byron had circumnavigated the globe, and was the younger brother of the 5th Baron Byron, known as "the Wicked Lord". John "Foulweather Jack" Byron and Sophia Trevanion. His treatment of her was described as "brutal and vicious", and she died after having given birth to two daughters, only one of which survived: Byron's half-sister, Augusta.īyron's paternal grandparents were Vice-Admiral The Hon. ![]() Byron's father had previously seduced the married Marchioness of Caermarthen and, after she divorced her husband the Earl, had married her. 1811), a descendant of Cardinal Beaton and heiress of the Gight estate in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. He was the son of Captain John "Mad Jack" Byron and his second wife, the former Catherine Gordon (d. He died at 36 years old from a fever contracted while in Missolonghi in Greece.īyron's names were changed throughout his life. He travelled to fight against the Ottoman Empire in the Greek War of Independence, for which Greeks revere him as a national hero. It has been speculated that he suffered from bipolar I disorder, or manic depression. He was famously described by Lady Caroline Lamb as "mad, bad and dangerous to know". ![]() He is regarded as one of the greatest British poets and remains widely read and influential.īyron was celebrated in life for aristocratic excesses including huge debts, numerous love affairs, rumours of a scandalous incestuous liaison with his half-sister, and self-imposed exile. Among Byron's best-known works are the brief poems She Walks in Beauty, When We Two Parted, and So, we'll go no more a roving, in addition to the narrative poems Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Don Juan. The first four lines of Byron's verse are beautiful because they are so evocative the last five lines are beautiful because they are so full of wisdom and insight.George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, later George Gordon Noel, 6th Baron Byron, FRS, commonly known simply as Lord Byron, was a British poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement. It is beautifully evocative and romantic, but it is also somewhat untruthful for it is impossible for us to be rolled sound in Earth's diurnal course in the same way that, for instance, a wild animal is. Wordsworth, in a short poem which begins "A slumber did my spirit seal" wrote about his soul being "rolled sound in Earth's diurnal course with rocks and stones and trees". Yet this striving to conceal has presumably led to the disjunct with Nature, which means we can only hold "interviews" with our true selves, that we must attempt to "steal" wisdom and insight which ought to be ours by right, and that we cannot express what we truly are. He states that modern humans have tried (with only partial success) to "conceal" their essence and origins. But he is also unsure of the how and the wherefore of his Nature being, using the words "may be". Byron is asserting the belief that our origins and essence lie in Nature, that we are from Nature, that perhaps we ought to be one with Nature, and that therefore this mingling with the Universe is a pleasurable, wonderful thing. What Byron is saying is that although there is a pleasure in the pathless woods etc., although we are drawn to Nature because Nature is "all I may be, or have been before", there is also a clear disjunct between modern humans and Nature. Yet we wouldn't be surprised if John Donne came up with such a remark, so it certainly isn't because it is "too modern". ![]() I think people are only complaining that it doesn't sound right or sounds too modern because it de-romanticises the opening lines. I think use of the word interview is brilliant and demonstrates the greatness of the poet. ![]()
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