Byron and Romanticism
George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) belonged to the second generation of English Romantic poets, alongside Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats. His poetry is associated with titanism, individualism, restlessness and melancholy. Byron identified closely with his main characters, and his life and public reputation contributed to his image as a rebellious figure.
Nature and the Byronic hero
Unlike Wordsworth, who presents Nature as a calm teacher and source of moral guidance, Byron uses it as a mirror of turbulent feeling. Storms, dark seas and imposing mountains suit this emotional intensity. The Byronic hero, found in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and the Oriental Tales, is mysterious, rebellious and burdened by a secret past. The source connects this figure to Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost and to Byron’s own exaggerated personality. It also associates the hero’s sense of doom with Calvinist ideas of predestination.
Satire and Don Juan
- Byron’s Augustan side looks back to eighteenth-century poetry through satire and mock-heroic writing. In English Bards and Scotch Reviewers and The Vision of Judgement, he attacks literary and public figures. His masterpiece, Don Juan, uses ottava rima for burlesque and cynical social criticism, targeting hypocrisy, sentimentalism, marriage conventions and corrupt politics. His poetry gained major influence in Europe, where Goethe praised his embodiment of the desire for freedom.