I just wanted to learn the basic outline of Lord Byron’s life without having to commit to the hundreds of pages most of his biographies boast. Something brief, but authoritative. Something for which I could be sure the author was vetted. I hadn’t read any of the Writers and their Works series before. It gets good reviews and here was the story of Byron in less than 100 pages! I was excited to get started. Then I discovered this is mostly about his poems rather than his life. It contains 21 pages of biography and 60 of poetic analysis. I really should’ve checked more reviews. I’m not really into poetic analysis. I know that those of us who create tend to think of our creations as extensions of ourselves. I’ve made 3-D art (kind of like sculpture), I’ve drawn, I’ve painted, I’ve written. These are parts of me that exist in the world. But really, I just wanted to know what Byron’s life was like.
Actually, I did learn the answers to some of my questions. Although a “lord,” he didn’t inherit much wealth. Indeed, the opposite. His eventual wealth came from his poetry. This is nearly an impossible dream these days, of course. His fame brought the spotlight onto his personal life and politics. A man who easily “fell in love”—he was a Romantic, after all—he had affairs and his politics weren’t those of the majority. He left England at the advice of a friend, never to return. He was friends with Percy Shelley, which is common knowledge. As he made a home, actually several homes, in Europe, he continued to earn good money for his poems. He was famous and feared, it seems. Although the book doesn’t describe it, he gave the world its Byronic hero.
I haven’t read much of Byron’s poetry. That style of writing has never appealed to me. The poetic life, however, is of endless interest. Shelley drowned on a boat trip home after visiting him in Italy, and Byron was present at the cremation. (And I got yelled at in the New York Public Library for trying to snap a picture of the fragments of Shelley’s skull that were on a special display. Byron had been there in person, of course.) A few short years later Byron also died while helping to plan and finance the Greek war for independence. Still, there is more I’d like to know. But probably not enough to read a biography of several hundred pages, though.
