On February 1, 1814, Lord Byron's "The Corsair" is
published and sells over 10,000 copies on its first day in print. The poem was
one of several gloomy works he produced at a time when he was engaged in
several ill-fated love affairs. Byron was born in Aberdeen, Scotland, in 1788
and was raised in poverty. Burdened with a clubfoot, Byron later forbid anyone
to mention his condition. At age 10, he inherited his great uncle's title and
became Lord Byron. He attended Harrow, then Trinity College, Cambridge, where
he ran up enormous debts. His first published volume of poetry, Hours of
Idleness (1807), was savaged by critics, especially in Scotland, and his
second published work, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809),
attacked the British literary establishment. After taking his master's degree
in 1809, he traveled in Portugal, Spain, and the Near East for two years. His
wanderings inspired his poetic work Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812),
which won him almost instant acclaim in England. In 1815, he married Anne
Isabella Milbanke, and the couple had a daughter, August Ada, the following
year. The marriage quickly foundered, and the couple legally separated. By this
time, scandal had broken out over Byron's suspected incest with his
half-sister, Augusta Leigh. He was ostracized from society and forced to flee
England in 1816. He settled in Geneva, near Percy Bysshe Shelley and his wife,
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. There, he became intimately involved with Mary's
half-sister, Claire Clairmont, who bore his daughter Allegra in January 1817.
Byron moved to Venice that same year and began a period of debauchery. In 1819,
he entered an affair with the Countess Teresa Guiccioli, the young wife of an
elderly count, and the two remained attached for many years. Byron, always an
avid proponent of liberal causes and national independence, supported the Greek
war for independence. He joined the cause in Greece, training troops in the
town of Missolonghi, where he died on April 19, 1824, at the age 36.
No comments:
Post a Comment