19 April 2024 is the bicentenary of Byron’s death in Greece during the War of Greek Independence. The event is marked by many new books, conferences, and a gracious commemorative service in Westminster Abbey where he was refused burial two hundred years ago. The London statue of him which was intended as a national monument now finds itself on a traffic island surrounded by busy traffic but plans have now been made and agreed to move it to a prominent place in Hyde Park.

Byron has never slipped out of public view since, in his celebrated phrase, he awoke and found himself famous on 3 March 1812. This is because his extraordinary life and personality are found interesting by each new generation and his poetry, both dark, intense, gloomy, and witty, satirical, and full of inventive gaiety always finds new readers and critics in many different countries. His poetry is  varied in form and has both formal and experimental brilliance but it appeals too because, like that of Chaucer and Shakespeare, it illumines a considerable range of human experience.

The early reputation of Byron in England  rested on his force of personality, death in Greece, and a number of poems (especially Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage  and Manfred) that, in a way that seemed wholly new, explored dark pathways marked both by guilt and  strange energies within the (usually male) self. On the continent this pattern obtained too but with particular emphasis on Byron’s association with Liberal causes and revolutions. In the Twentieth Century, interest shifted to his witty poems (especially his masterpiece Don Juan) centring in social and sexual life, foregrounding women, but also satirising social norms and the haphazard violence of war. In the second half of the century, monumental biographies, full editions of his letters (both owing much to Leslie Marchand), and a new complete edition of his poems (by Jerome McGann) made it more possible to see Byron whole both as man and poet. Hence books in the later years of last century and the early years of this one have taken advantage of this. Byron’s poetry and thought is now probably taken more seriously by scholars and critics than at any time since his death but his popular reputation amongst those who know of him but have not read him is, as it has always largely been, to do with his life-style, aristocracy, sexual profligacy and his enigmatic character.

Liverpool University Press has published a considerable number of books on Byron which present a deeper, more serious,  and more accurate version of his life, thought, and writings.

‘‘Our Mix’d Essence’: Manfred’s Ecological Turn’
J. Hubbell
The Byron Journal Vol. 42, No. 1
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‘Byron and Slavery’
Christine Kenyon Jones
The Byron Journal Vol. 51, No. 2
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‘The Fixed and the Fluid: Identity in Byron and Shelley’
Michael O’Neill
The Byron Journal Vol. 36, No. 2
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