Lord George Byron

The Selected Poetry of Lord Byron

Lord George Byron

Lord George Gordon Byron was the flamboyant aristrocratic Romantic poet who is as renown for his personal life as he is for his poetry. Lord Byron lived a short life, from 1788 to 1824, but managed to create a volume of poetry that achieved him the status as one of the greatest English poets and is still widely read in the English-speaking world and beyond. This extensive selection includes such classics as «Childe Harold's Pilgrimage», a sweeping narrative poem which relays the story of a world-weary young man who abandons a life of pleasure for distraction in foreign lands, and a selection from «Don Juan», widely considered Byron's masterpiece which tells the legend of Don Juan as a man who is easily seduced by women instead of the more common womanizing portrayal. Fans of English Romantic poetry would be remiss in skipping this fine collection of over one hundred of Byron's classic poetic works.

Don Juan

Lord George Byron

Often acknowledged as Byron's masterpiece, «Don Juan» is an epic poem, comprised of seventeen cantos, which follows an irreverent young man on his European adventures and reflects upon many of the experiences universal to man. From a forbidden love affair in Spain to exile in Italy, from being shipwrecked in Greece to slavery in Russia, Don Juan's adventures provide Byron with an exquisite framework of high drama to discuss and often mock Western societies with coarse humor and extreme satire. Interwoven in this innovative work are Byron's discussions on such topics as social convention, war, and, perhaps most significantly, human nature, with a vindication of all of natural man's gracious and ignoble impulses, in an elaborate and memorable criticism of modern human life.