Was lord byron gay
Lord Byron
George Gordon Byron, the 6th Baron Byron , known simply as Lord Byron , was an English poet and commander of the Romantic movement.
Byron is regarded as one of the greatest English poets, one who was immensely popular during his time and remains authoritative today. Among his best-known works are the elongated narrative poems Don Juan (1819) and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812). His sonnet She Walks in Beauty (1814) is also quoted frequently to this diurnal.
His love life scandalized society at the occasion. He had a very public affair with Lady Caroline Lamb, after which she followed him and even tried sneaking into his house dressed as a page boy. In 1816, she went on to publish Glenarvon (1816), a wildly popular (and unflattering) novel about Byron and society.
Eventually, Byron courted and married Caroline Lamb's cousin, Anne Isabella Milbanke, in 1815. They had one daughter, Augusta Ada (Ada Lovelace), in 1816, but the marriage was unhappy and soon ended with Byron signing a Deed of Separation.
After the dissolution of his marriage, Byron went to continental Europe where he spent the rest of his life. It was there that Byron befriended the poet Pe
Back to issue
‘Temperate I am, yet never had a temper,’ Byron wrote in the unfinished seventeenth canto of Don Juan, whose fragments he took with him on his closing expedition to Greece in 1823:
Modest I am, though with some slight assurance,
Changeable too, yet somehow idem semper,
Patient, though not enamoured of endurance
Cheerful, but sometimes rather apt to whimper,
Mild, but at times a sort of Hercules furens,
So that I almost think that the alike skin
For one without has two or three within.
The picture is both strangely boastful and disarmingly self-mocking, the complacent self-assessment of a dude confident in the interest with which others check him. He puzzled himself, sometimes happily, sometimes less so, and left his life ‘a problem, enjoy all things’ to his future biographers, who hold portrayed him in almost as great variety as he portrayed himself. Most of these versions are more or less familiar, and more or less incompatible with each other: the melancholy misanthrope, the people’s champion, the arrogant peer, the man of action, the play-soldier, the fool of women, the bane of women, the gay icon, the Passionate, the anti-Romantic. He wrote
Lord Byron
As known for his scandalous confidential life as for his work, Byron was born on 22nd January 1788 in London and inherited the title Baron Byron from his great uncle at the age of 10.
He endured a chaotic childhood in Aberdeen, brought up by his schizophrenic mother and an abusive nurse. These experiences, plus the fact that he was born with a club foot, may hold had something to perform with his constant desire to be loved, expressed through his many affairs with both men and women.
He was educated at Harrow School and Trinity College, Cambridge. It was at Harrow that he experienced his first treasure affairs with both sexes. In 1803 at the age of 15 he fell madly in passion with his cousin, Mary Chaworth, who did not return his feelings. This unrequited passion was the basis for his works ‘Hills of Annesley’ and ‘The Adieu’.
Whilst at Trinity he experimented with value, discovered politics and fell into debt (his mother said he had a “reckless disregard for mone
Lord Byron
Byron: Life and Legend by Fiona MacCarthy (640pp, John Murray, £25) was published in 2001. The novel evidences Byron's love for male youths: it was those beautiful boys, from Clare at Harrow to Edleston at Cambridge and all those nameless sloe-eyed Portuguese and Greek youths, who were at the real centre of Byron's erotic life[1].
Life
The son of army officer "Mad Jack" Byron, he inherited the title of Baron Byron of Rochdale from his great-uncle "the Wicked Lord" Byron at the age of 10. Despite being born with a deformed foot, he was very athletic, and swam the Hellespont from Europe to Asia in 1810. This is sometimes taken to be the birth of the sport of open water swimming.
In 1809–10 he went on the"grand
.