All Things Byron
Welcome to our Byron Blog. Here you will find lively and engaging explorations of all things Byron, from fresh academic perspectives on key aspects of his literature and life, to modern responses to this most celebrated of poets, rebels and lovers.
To get involved, contact us on Twitter @Byron_Society or email contact@thebyronsociety.com.
Reading Byron
Marc Gotthard, 5th February, 2023
Un Viaggio del Cuore—A Journey of the Heart
By Marty Ambrose
6th April 2022
Claire Clairmont. Stepsister of Mary Shelley. Mistress of Lord Byron. The almost-famous member of the Byron/Shelley circle.
I had always been mildly interested in her as a scholar but, also, so influenced by Byron’s offhand comment in a letter about Claire as “that odd-headed girl”; and Mary Shelley’s thinly-disguised annoyance with her stepsister’s constant presence in her life with Shelley (often tinged with jealousy)….
The Vampyre as a literary war on the image of Greece
By Konstantina Tortomani
9th January 2022
This blog post is based on a paper given at the 2021 International Byron Conference, which won the Byron Society Student Paper Award. The paper explores the first vampire Gothic novel, John William Polidori’s The Vampyre: A Tale (1819) as a form of a response regarding the image of Greece in Byron’s early works, and especially in “The Giaour” (1813) and “Fragment of a Novel” (1819).
Strictest Adultery: Byron’s Italian Loves
By Emily Paterson Morgan, Gavin Roberts, Amanda Pitt and Helen Semple
22nd July 2021
Byron, walking in beauty, with an indie pop spring in his step
Tess Callaghan, 30th July 2021
Don Juan Finish’d
A poem by Max Gutman, 20th May 2021
Byron‘s £332,000 cheque for Greece
by Dr Christine Kenyon Jones and Professor Roderick Beaton, 29th April 2021
Strange Mystery Flower sing Lord Byron
by Roger Arias, 22nd January 2021
The ‘superannuated Jesuit’ – Byron’s worst portrait?
By Christine Kenyon Jones, 21st October 2020
The Mystery of Allegra’s Monument
By Hanna Barbara Coltman, 17th July 2020
Locking down with Byron (and a few others)
By Jennifer and Rebecca Douglas, 29th May 2020
Byron’s Spirit at Newstead
Old abbey walls
were calling
the day you startled me
your garden gleamed…
Byron, a long journey
Byron’s spirit and influence follow us around, even when we’re not consciously walking in his footsteps. At my school, Shelley’s poetry was on the ‘A’ level English syllabus (even though much of his poetry had been trashed by F.R. Leavis). Lord Byron didn’t get a look-in. At university I discovered Don Juan, which made a delightful change from Paradise Lost, the Aeneid and Beowulf. It wasn’t until I was posted to Greece in 1980 that I became conscious of how central Byron’s work…
Amour and Regrets
A CD of music based on Byron’s works from a concert given at the Institut Hongrois on the 6th of July 2016 during the International Byron Conference in Paris. This recording aims to give a glimpse of the richness and variety of Byron’s work as a source of musical inspiration, from the very beginning of its reception in France to its post-Romantic days of glory in central Europe at the end of the century.
Unity and Fragmentation of the Speaking Past: Representations of the Classical Voice in Byron, Seferis, and Capetanakis
Byron’s “The Isles of Greece”, an ode inserted within the larger framework of Byron’s Don Juan (1819-1824), is famously and widely considered an hymn to the liberation of the Greek state from Ottoman occupation. As an inspirational song of freedom and independence, “The Isles of Greece” calls onto the Greek ancient and classical past in order to inspire the revolution. Starting from this use of the classics as a source of nationalist pride and revolution, I will compare Byron’s portrayal of the ancient past…
The Lord Poet
An Interview with Megan Franks.
I have always been fascinated with society and morality and what makes those rules effective. When I researched Byron, I found him to be an anomaly, in that he seemed to follow his own moral compass. This isn’t an unusual characteristic per se, except in the instance that his lack of adherence to rules seemed to stem from his broader perception of the world vs. a genuine dislike for authority or something of the like.
Comic Method in Byron’s Don Juan
I want to conclude this series on the ‘mobility’ of Bryon’s comic performance in Don Juan with a slightly longer post (apologies!). I think there’s an aspect of Byron’s art that his most severe critics seem to have missed although, to me, it seems obvious. In brief, Byron may be a contemporary of the great English Romantic poets (Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge) but he shares little of their interest in introspective reflection on metaphysics or psychology. As W.H. Auden argued in the Introduction to his 1966 Selected Poetry and Prose of Byron, Byron is a ‘realist’ and not a ‘romantic’.
First the Words:
Holocaust survivor, poet, and composer Mira J. Spektor on Lord Byron
Performed by soprano Maeve Höglund, Mira J. Spektor’s new album SUMMER & WINTER SONGS glides through stories of love and loss. With songs set to texts by herself, Goethe, Byron, and a selection of poetry by her granddaughter Lily Nussbaum, Spektor’s songs are as lyrical as they are profound. The richly melodic work is alive with images of falling into slumber as summer fades to fall, bitter winter chills within the heart of one whose lover is far away, passionate romance …
Doubt & Murder: Cain’s Humanistic Liberation
Lord Byron produced Cain when “a wave of blasphemy prosecutions [had] swept through England”. As a controversial response to such a crisis, Byron dramatically revised the myth of Cain and shaped the first human murderer as a rebellious hero pursuing knowledge and the truth of life with great revolutionary passion against rigid religious control on free thoughts. After Cain had been published, Walter Scott thought it made Byron “certainly matched Milton on his own ground”.
The Comic Role of “Byron”
If there were such a competition, I would vote for Don Juan as the greatest comic poem in English. But some distinguished critics consider Byron a psychological light-weight; someone who won’t face up to (either) his internal turmoil and feelings of culpability (or, alternately) his inner ‘hollowness’ by which is meant, I guess, a lack of insight. That diminishes his fame, they say. I referred, last time, to Mathew Arnold, who esteemed Byron but who agreed with a remark of Goethe (not made about Don Juan, however): “the moment he begins to reflect; he is a child…”
Comic Mobility in Don Juan
Reading aloud, or listening to the poem, works well for Don Juan for two reasons. First, it’s a personal statement. The narrative, when there is one, never much conceals the narrator and, where there’s any danger it might, Byron steps forward to direct our attention back to himself in an aside or with a clever rhetorical trope. Voice is the poem’s medium, rather than meditation…
A Literary Odd Couple
Few poets in the pantheon of British literature are as un-Byronic as the dour, proper, sometimes oppressively high-minded laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson. So among the many (I hope pleasant) surprises in my new Tennyson study, Tennyson’s Poems: New Textual Parallels, from Open Book Publishers, are the thirty-plus instances in which phrases of as few as two or three and as many as several words in Byron poems turn up verbatim or very nearly so in poems of Tennyson.
Narrating Byron’s Amatory Epic
I’m preparing to publish (“free”) an annotated and narrated edition of Cantos I & II of Byron’s Don Juan on the bicentenary of their first London publication this July. But “why narration”? Aren’t there already several readings? Do we need another?
Don Juan: Sense From Sound

The way people read these days poses challenges for the publisher of poetry as I explained last time. It’s hard to show the verse of Don Juan’s verse in unbroken lines across the narrow confines of a phone screen. Unless, you choose a font size so small that it’s hard to read anyway….
Don Juan: Who needs it, who reads it?
Don Juan: The Greatest Comic Poem in English

Germaine Greer once observed that Don Juan is the greatest comic poem in English. It should be as popular, she thought, as Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso in Italy or, for that matter, Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin in Russia. True, in my view!


“And again”, boomed Simon Russell Beale, as he deftly propelled the pianist and Lord Byron downstage to take another bow… This was October 2018, at Cadogan Hall; Byron Angel & Outcast was my fifth dramatised concert. The proceeds were directed to Dr Vincent Khoo’s research at the Royal Marsden into advanced prostate cancer. The full story began two years before.

Streaming Byron As a Musical Story

6th February 2019
Musician John Webster discusses his transformation of Byron’s experiences during the Greek War into a musical showpiece narrated by Benjamin Zephaniah.
Three Musical Settings of Byron Love Poems

Composer Brian Daubney describes the inspiration he finds in Byron’s poetry, and the circumstances which led to him composing three musical settings for Byron’s ‘She Walks in Beauty’, ‘When we Two Parted’ and ‘So We’ll No More Go A-Roving’. The music is available to listen to in the blog, along with the musical scores.

Stephen Minta
We begin a long way from Lord Byron. In fact, at the very dawn of European literary culture. I’m going to start with a brief passage from Homer’s Iliad, book 3. Helen, she of Troy, has just been looking from the battlements at the vast army of the Greeks below her on the Trojan plain […]
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