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Byron's Life
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The Poetry of Lord Byron
In this course, Professor Sir Drummond Bone (University of Oxford) discusses the life and poetry of Lord Byron. After a brief introduction to the man himself—once famously described as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know”—we then provide a brief overview of his literary output, including such landmark writings as Childe Harold, Manfred, The Turkish Tales, and Don Juan. After that, we look more closely at five of Byron’s poems: Stanzas to Music (1814), Fare Thee Well (1815), So We’ll Go No More A Roving (1817), On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year (1824) and Don Juan (1818-24).
Byron's Life
In this module, we focus on the life and times of Lord Byron himself, thinking in particular about Byron’s celebrity status—which he owed both to his extraordinary poetry and to various scandals—as well as his travels round Germany, Switzerland, Italy and (especially) Greece, where he died at the age of just thirty-six.
My name is Drummond Bone.
00:00:02I am master of Balliol College, Oxford professor of English literature,
00:00:04And I'm going to talk about Lord Byron for the next few minutes.
00:00:08Byron was born in 17 88. He died when he was only 36.
00:00:14Um, he's often thought about as one of the first kind of, uh, mass celebrities.
00:00:19He had the kind of pop star status, uh,
00:00:25that we we we we didn't really expect in the in the in the middle of the, uh,
00:00:28the beginning, I should say in the 19th century.
00:00:35And, uh, and we didn't see for a long while after that.
00:00:37And that wasn't just in Britain, either. That was right across Europe.
00:00:41He's actually still the most read, uh, British author after Shakespeare.
00:00:45If we look at it globally
00:00:51and we don't often think that I think in the UK,
00:00:53where we we know other authors like Milton or Wordsworth or Keats or Shelley,
00:00:55Perhaps better than Byron.
00:00:59Why was he a celebrity?
00:01:01It was a celebrity, not only because of the success of his poetry,
00:01:03which was which was extraordinary.
00:01:07And he was a best read author for for many, many best read Poet for many,
00:01:10many years in the UK
00:01:15but also as usual with celebrities because of scandal
00:01:17and the virus case, I suppose, like many, maybe most celebrities, uh,
00:01:22the scandal was was about sex.
00:01:27Um, first of all, Byron was clearly bisexual,
00:01:30although he was mainly heterosexual in in countries where that was the
00:01:34expected norm and could be homosexual in countries where that was,
00:01:40how shall we say more, More commonly accepted.
00:01:45But he was bisexual.
00:01:48Um,
00:01:50though that wasn't the main scandal during his life because people
00:01:50wouldn't know about his his his bisexuality during his life.
00:01:53The main scandal during his life was just a
00:01:58lot of lovers in particularly one Caroline Lamb.
00:02:01And there's been a film made about his relationships with Caroline Lamb.
00:02:05But many, many lovers, including his half sister,
00:02:09and that did get out during his lifetime, and that caused a lot of a lot of trouble.
00:02:13He was also a political celebrity.
00:02:20He was what, nowadays we would call very left wing.
00:02:23Uh, he voted for Catholic emancipation.
00:02:26He voted against the death penalty for people who were breaking new machines.
00:02:29This was the beginning of the industrial revolution,
00:02:35so he was thought of as very left wing.
00:02:37Eventually,
00:02:40he had to leave the UK because of all these scandals are he felt he had to leave the UK.
00:02:41Uh, and he spent the last, uh, eight years of his life overseas in Europe,
00:02:47travelling first of all in Germany and Switzerland and then in Italy.
00:02:53And then he went to Greece to fight for
00:02:57the Greek war of independence against the Turks,
00:02:59and he died there.
00:03:02Um, we retrace our steps just a little bit while he was in Italy.
00:03:04Uh, he was also working there with the freedom fighters in Italy.
00:03:08And there's some lovely reports from the Austrian secret
00:03:13police who were terribly interested in barren sexual activities
00:03:15and completely missed the fact that he was
00:03:20actually running arms for the freedom fighters.
00:03:23It's really, really quite quite comic.
00:03:25Um, he went to Greece. Um, he proved himself to be an extraordinary organiser.
00:03:29So you might think he was this poet famous poet, um, living a chaotic life.
00:03:35But actually,
00:03:42when he was asked to organise both the
00:03:42administration of a town and a military operation,
00:03:46he actually turned into an extremely good organiser and administrator.
00:03:51But he caught a fever of some kind in Greece. Nobody's quite sure what he died of.
00:03:57He was living a very hectic lifestyle, as I've already tried to say so.
00:04:02He was probably going to die young anyway, But he caught a fever. Uh, died in Greece.
00:04:06But his death in Greece had an enormous positive effect on the Greek cause.
00:04:13And he's still a national hero in Greece
00:04:19because of the effect that really his death had
00:04:23in the last few months of his life had on the on the cause of Greek independence.
00:04:26So there you have it.
00:04:32A wild man, a celebrity,
00:04:33a great poet with also a kind of global reach because of his involvement
00:04:35in the in the march towards what we would now call the nation state.
00:04:43Uh, the idea of of of separate countries being a free, uh,
00:04:47at the beginning of the 19th century
00:04:52
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Bone, D. (2018, August 15). The Poetry of Lord Byron - Byron's Life [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/the-poetry-of-lord-byron/fare-thee-well-1815
MLA style
Bone, D. "The Poetry of Lord Byron – Byron's Life." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 15 Aug 2018, https://massolit.io/courses/the-poetry-of-lord-byron/fare-thee-well-1815