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George Gordon Byron was born in London on 22 January 1788 and grew up in Aberdeen with his mother. At ten he inherited the title of sixth Baron Byron and the ruined family seat of Newstead Abbey. He went to school at Harrow and then to Trinity College, Cambridge. His first collection, Hours of Idleness (1807), got a savage review in the Edinburgh Review, and he answered it with the satire English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809).
After two years travelling in Portugal, Spain, Albania, Greece and Turkey, he published the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in 1812 and, in his own words, “awoke one morning and found myself famous.” The Eastern tales that followed (The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair, Lara) sold in huge numbers. So did the Hebrew Melodies (1815), which include “She Walks in Beauty” and “The Destruction of Sennacherib.”
His marriage to Annabella Milbanke broke down within a year amid scandal. In 1816 Byron left England for good. In Switzerland, near the Shelleys, he wrote the third canto of Childe Harold, The Prisoner of Chillon and “Darkness.” In Italy he wrote Beppo, Mazeppa, The Vision of Judgment and his comic masterpiece Don Juan, still unfinished at his death. In 1823 he sailed to help the Greek War of Independence. He died of fever at Missolonghi on 19 April 1824, aged 36, and Greece still honours him as a national hero.
Byron’s poetry runs from tender song (“So we’ll go no more a-roving”) to epic satire. His wit, his gift for travel writing and his self-dramatizing melancholy shaped Romanticism across Europe. All of his poems are in the public domain.
Read the full collection: Lord Byron Poems.