Lord George Gordon Byron (1788-1824) was as famous in his
lifetime for his personality cult as for his poetry. He created the concept of the "Byronic hero" - a bold, proud, rebellious, though at times melancholy,
young man, brooding on some mysterious, unforgivable event in his past.
Byron's influence on European poetry, music, novel, opera, and painting has
been immense and prolonged, although the poet was widely condemned on moral
grounds by his contemporaries.
He was the only
English poet of his age to achieve a European reputation and to exert a
significant influence on the Romantic movement - Alfred
de Musset was his disciple in France, Aleksandr Pushkin in Russia, Heinrich
Heine in Germany, Adam Mickiewicz in Poland. His poetry inspired musical
compositions by Hector Berlioz, Robert Schumann, and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky;
operas by Gaetano Donizetti and Giuseppe Verdi; and paintings by J. M. W.
Turner and Eugène Delacroix. His spirit animated liberal revolutionary
movements: the Italian patriot Giuseppe Mazzini associated Byron with the
eternal struggle of the oppressed to be free.
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