This poem is definitely on your Poetry 101 syllabus.
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes;
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
We’ve all heard this one in high school English class. It features one of the most famous opening lines in the history of poetry — one so ubiquitous it almost seems cliché. It was written by Lord Byron, the 19th-century English Romantic poet, a man who also struggled with manic depression.
Byron also famously coined the phrase “truth is… stranger than fiction.”
“We of the craft are all crazy,” Byron once wrote of his poetic ilk. “Some are affected by gaiety, others by melancholy, but all are more or less touched.”
With a family history of suicides, financial problems, and chronic “madness,” Lord George Gordon Byron came from an aristocratic family. His father abandoned him at a young age and his mother was schizophrenic. Famously bisexual, Byron had affairs with both men and women while a student at Trinity College in Cambridge.
At age 20, he wrote his first volume of poetry, Hours of Idleness, which received poor reviews. As payback, he wrote a satirical poem, “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers,” which won him praise in the literary community. He would go on to write a vast anthology of poetry, including two narrative poems, “Don Juan” and “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” for which he became famous during his lifetime.
“Heir to madness, virulently melancholic, and in lifelong fear of going insane, Byron represents the fine edge of the fine madness — the often imperceptible line between poetic temperament and psychiatric illness,” writes Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison in her book Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, which shines a spotlight on the lives of bipolar artists, including Vincent Van Gogh, Edgar Allen Poe, and Virginia Woolf.
Like many manic-depressives, Byron was suicidal, as he alludes to in this letter dated 1817: “I should, many a good day, have blown my brains out.”
“The mind of Lord Byron was like a volcano,” wrote Byron’s friend Leicester Stanhope. “Full of fire and wealth, sometimes calm, often dazzling and playful, but ever threatening. It ran swift as the lightning from one subject to another, and occasionally burst forth in passionate throes of intellect, nearly allied to madness.”
Madness. You wouldn’t actually think there was an element of madness if you were to read selections of Byron’s poetry. Much of it is about nature, love or atheism.
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes
By the deep sea, and music in its roar
I love not Man the less, but Nature more.
— “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”
Byron was quite the world traveler. Post college, he traveled to Portugal, Spain, and the Near East, and even spent the last eight years of his life abroad — in Switzerland, Italy, and Greece. In 1823 in Greece, he was invited to support the struggle for the country’s independence from the Ottoman Empire. He spent 4,000 pounds of his own money to restore the Greek naval fleet and trained troops in the town of Missolonghi.
In 1824, Byron became ill. The exact cause of his death is unclear, but he died on April 19, 1824 at the age of 36.
“Symptoms consistent with mania, depression, and mixed states are evident in the descriptions of Byron given by his physicians, friends, and Byron himself,” writes Jamison. “His mood fluctuations were extreme, ranging from the suicidally melancholic to the irritable, volatile, violent, and expansive. Symptoms of depression included ennui, despair, lethargy, and sleeplessness. He thought of suicide and discussed it with others, to the extent that his friends and wife were at times concerned that he would take his own life. To a degree he saw his involvement with the Greek independence cause as a probable road to death, and it is likely that had he not died in Greece he would have killed himself in another way.”
It is extremely rare for a poet to become famous during his lifetime, but Byron did. And an early death didn’t hinder his prolificity. Lord Byron’s oeuvre is colossal. He wrote a countless number of poems and at least seven finished plays. However, Byron clearly longed for death, as can be seen in Canto IV from “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.”
But I have lived, and have not lived in vain
My mind may lose its force, my blood its fire,
And my frame perish even in conquering pain,
But there is that within me which shall tire
Torture and Time, and breathe when I expire.
