Lord Byron Research Paper

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Lord Byron, a dazzling and interesting poet, was a controversial poet during the romantic period. Byron was fated to live fast and die young. He was seen as controversial due to his mixture of high romance, nature, and his own life experiences. With these features Lord Byron played a leading role in the movement of the romantic period throughout England, and was a leader of the century’s poetic revolution. His renowned sexual antics is only overlooked by the beauty of his literary work. Byron, born on January 22 1788, with a clubbed foot, which he blamed his parents for, is famously mentioned every time Byron is talked about. At a very young age Byron was taken from his mother and left to fend for himself. As he grew older his family became …show more content…

His time in Greece sparked his interest for poetry, and allowed him to explore his sexuality. One reason he decided to travel to Europe was because of England’s strict laws on homosexuality. Byron had an affair with a boy in the choir who was much younger than him, so to avoid being charged and possibly put to death he fled the country. Byron’s acts of homosexuality will come to haunt him later in life. During his excursion to Europe he wrote his first poem the “Childe Harold”.(Leslie A. Merchand) Later, returning to England, Byron got word that his mother was extremely ill. Once he had made it back home his mother had already passed away, she was the closest family he ever knew. Soon after he received a letter informing him that a former lover, John Edleston, died of consumption. However his fortune was about to make a turn for the better. Shortly after his return from Europe, Byron’s poem, “Childe Harold” was published. Byron was a sexual figure during the time, irresistible to both men and women. This poem is what leads to all of his affairs and marriages. Women were now fighting over him and throwing themselves at him, which was a huge boost for his ego. Byron was very self-conscious due to his club foot, thus most paintings of Byron depict him in a low cut shirt with fair skin and full lips. One of his most scandalous affairs was with the married Lady Caroline Lamb. After Lamb read the “Childes …show more content…

Romanticism was arguably the largest artistic movement of the 1700’s. Romantic poets cultivated individualism, a look on the nature of the world, and a passion for feeling and emotion. Romanticism ideas were never dried out after this movement as they were absorbed into many other different movements. On a summer night Byron was attending a party when he saw a women who stunned his eyes when she walked, and was inspired to write “She Walks in Beauty”. This poem is a great one from Lord Byron and is about a woman's exceptional beauty inside and out. In each stanza of the poem Byron continues to talk about how different parts of a woman are beautiful. The first stanza of the poem praises a woman’s physical beauty as the second and third stanzas are spiritual, physical, and intellectual beauty. Byron uses a lot of similes and metaphors in this poem. Byron presents a real portrait of the young woman in the first two stanzas by contrasting white with black and light with shadow in the same way that nature presents a portrait of the landscape on a cloudless starlit night. He tells the reader in line 3 that she combines “the best of dark and bright" and says that darkness and light temper each other when they meet in her raven hair. Byron's words turn opposites into rights working together to celebrate beauty. (English History) (“She Walks in

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