Lord Byron: The Mark Steele Lectures

Part One


Part Two


Part Three

"I would blow my brains out but for the pleasure I know it would give my mother-in-law" Byron.

George Gordon Byron, later Noel, 6th Baron Byron FRS (22 January 1788– 19 April 1824) was a British poet and a leading figure in Romanticism. Amongst 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. He is regarded as one of the greatest European poets and remains widely read and influential, both in the English-speaking world and beyond.

Byron's fame rests not only on his writings but also on his life, which featured upper-class living, numerous love affairs, debts, and separation. He was famously described by Lady Caroline Lamb as "mad, bad, and dangerous to know". Byron served as a regional leader of Italy's revolutionary organization, the Carbonari, in its struggle against Austria. He later traveled to fight against the Ottoman Empire in the Greek War of Independence, for which Greeks revere him as a national hero.[2] He died from a fever contracted while in Messolonghi in Greece.