Lord Byron · CatalogLord ByronLord Byron · CatalogGeorge Gordon Byron, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824), was born in London and raised by his mother in Aberdeen before inheriting his title at ten.
George Gordon Byron, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824), was born in London and raised by his mother in Aberdeen before inheriting his title at ten. Educated at Harrow and Cambridge, he became famous overnight with the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812). After a failed marriage and public scandal he left England in 1816 and never returned, living in Switzerland, Italy and finally Greece, where he died of fever while supporting the Greek war of independence.
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage: A Romaunt is a long poem in four cantos of Spenserian stanzas, published between 1812 and 1818, which made Byron the most famous poet in Europe. The first two cantos, appearing in March 1812, follow Childe Harold, a young nobleman weary of the pleasures of his ancestral hall, as he leaves England by sea and wanders through Portugal and Spain, where the Peninsular War against Napoleon is raging, and then through Albania and Greece.
She Walks in Beauty is a short lyric of three six-line stanzas that Byron wrote in June 1814 and published the following year in Hebrew Melodies, a collection of songs set to music by the composer Isaac Nathan. According to an early account, the poem was inspired by the sight of Byron's cousin by marriage, Mrs Anne Wilmot, at a London party, where she wore a black mourning dress brightened with spangles.
The Destruction of Sennacherib is a short narrative poem in six quatrains that Byron wrote at Seaham in February 1815 and published in Hebrew Melodies the same year. It retells the biblical story, found in 2 Kings 19 and Isaiah 37, of the Assyrian king Sennacherib's siege of Jerusalem in the days of King Hezekiah about 701 BC, when the angel of the Lord struck down the Assyrian army in a single night.
The Prisoner of Chillon is a narrative poem in fourteen sections that Byron wrote in two days in June 1816 at Ouchy on Lake Geneva, after visiting the castle of Chillon with Percy Shelley. It is loosely based on François Bonivard, a Genevan patriot imprisoned in the castle's dungeon by the Duke of Savoy from 1530 to 1536, though Byron invents most of the story.