Lord Byron

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guardian.co.uk, Tuesday July 22 2008 15.39 BST

1788-1824

"Who would write who had anything better to do?"

Birthplace

16 Holles St, London, England

Education

Aberdeen Grammar School; home tutors; Harrow; Trinity College, Cambridge, where he kept a bear as the more usual pets were sternly prohibited.

Other jobs

Sat in the House of Lords, where he championed liberalism.

Did you know?

He created and published an Armenian dictionary.

Critical verdict

"Lord Byron is only great as a poet; as soon as he reflects, he is a child," noted Goethe; contemporary opinion located his charisma in the man more than the poetry, with readers of Childe Harolde desperate for the next instalment of "his" adventures. Virginia Woolf, "much impressed" by the "extreme badness" of his poetry, admitted he had "force". Eliot concurred that "he added nothing to the language... discovered nothing in the sounds, and developed nothing in the meaning." The opposing school sees him as a radical freedom fighter and exuberant poetic force.

Recommended works

Childe Harold contains a buoyant mixture of wit, pathos, travelogue and appalling polysyllabic rhymes.

Influences

Byron took Pope's ironic detachment towards a more colloquial style.

Now read on

Byron is an irresistible character for many writers: try Paul West's Lord Byron's Doctor, written from Polidori's point of view, for a convincing portrait of an erotomaniac club-footed guru, while Byron's ghost looms throughout Tom Stoppard's Arcadia. And if you want vampires as well as Romantics, indulge in Tim Powers's The Stress of her Regard or Tom Holland's Lord of the Dead.

Adaptations

Don Juan and The Corsair were both filmed in melodramatic black and white; the Byronic hero spawned a thousand celluloid imitations - Gabriel Byrne is convincingly Byronic as Byron in Ken Russell's hallucinogenic and slightly laughable Gothic (1986).

Recommended biography

Child of Passion (Benita Eisler), The Flawed Angel (Phyllis Grosskurth): the titles demonstrate our take on the Byron legend. His letters and journals - many written with an eye towards publication - vividly conjure the life and times of an inimitable self-dramatiser ("Every day confirms my opinion on the superiority of a vicious life - and if Virtue is not its own reward I don't know any other," he declaimed). In the absence of the "shocking" memoirs burnt after his death, Leslie Marchand's Byron is the classic biography.