George Gordon, the sixth Lord Byron, is probably the most famous and controversial of the
Romantic poets, whose work took Europe by storm in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries. Byron was born in London on 22 nd January 1788, with a clubfoot about which he
became very sensitive. This disability, however, did not prevent him from being extremely
attractive to women. Byron is notorious because of his love affairs with both women and young
men. Lady Caroline Lamb, a one-time lover of Byron, described him as “mad, bad and
dangerous to know.” His marriage to Annabella Milbanke ended partly because of his love affair
with his half sister, Augusta Leigh. The poet lived a wild life of drinking and partying, but he
wrote beautiful poetry, much of it about his own life. Possibly the most talked about time in
Byron’s life is the time he spent in exile in Switzerland, near Geneva. He was visited by Percy
and Mary Shelley and they passed time by having a competition to write a horror story. This
resulted in Byron’s The Vampyre and the more famous Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. Byron
was always a restless man. During his travels, he had developed a love for Greece and, in July
1823, he sailed to Cephalonia to fight in the Greek war for independence from the Turks. Byron
became ill in February 1824, contracted a fever and died shortly afterwards. He was refused
burial in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey and it was not until 1969 that a plaque was erected
there in his honour.