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Lord George Gordon Byron (1788-1824) Poet

     Byron was born in London, became Lord in 1888 at the age of ten, and was educated at Harrow and Cambridge. His marriage to Anne Isabella Milbanke ended in 1816 and Byron left England for the Continent, under suspicion of being both a homosexual, and for having had an affair with his half-sister Augusta Leigh. He travelled through Belgium, Switzerland (where he befriended the Shelleys), and settled in Italy until 1823, when he left to help in the Greek war for independence from Turkey. He died in Greece of exhaustion and illness in 1824.

     Although best known for the travel narrative Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and the picaresque reworking of Don Juan, Byron did occasionaly use (or abuse) apocalyptic imagery. The short poem "Darkness," (1816) is a dream-vision which depicts the complete destruction of the human race by the feminine force of Darkness. In his drama Manfred, a revision of the Faust legend (1817), the threat of apocalyptic violence is invoked but finally deflected due to Manfred's refusal to submit to religion. In his satiric attack on Robert Southey, The Vision of Judgment (1822) the apocalypse is bandied about in such a light-hearted manner it provoked George Cruikshank to produce a caricature of Byron, proclaiming him the Lord of the Faithless, in which Byron tramples the "Book of Revelation."

Bibliography

Dingley, R.J. "Two Visions of Judgment: Byron and Southey." Durham University Journal 53:1 (1992).

Duffy, Edward. "Byron Representing Himself Against Southey." In. History and Myth: Essays on English Romantic Literature. Edited by Stephen Behrendt. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990.

Hill, Alan. "Three Visions of Judgment: Southey, Byro , and Newman." Review of English Studies 41: 163 (1990).

Jones, Emrys. "Byron's Visions of Judgment." Modern Language Review 76:1 (1981).

Murphy, Peter. "Visions of Success: Byron and Southey." Studies in Romanticism 24:3 (1985).

Warren, John. "A Critic's Defense and Self-Revelation." Publications of the Mississippi Philological Association (1988).