Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know…. really?

Katie Spalding vividly narrates in her hilarious book “The Limits of Genius” how Byron went to Cambridge, taking with him as a pet a fully grown ‘real’ bear protesting the college’s ‘no dogs’ rule. He lived beyond his means to the point that his old mum basically lived in hiding from his creditors. He was endlessly moody and so tormented with his weight that he’d probably be called anorexic today. And fellow poets would be the subject of his ire — especially if they had committed the cardinal sin of becoming more successful than Byron himself.?

There was Wordsworth, whom Byron called ‘Turdsworth’, and John Keats — ‘Jack Keats or Ketch or whatever his names are’. He wrote odes cursing Lord Elgin, who was at that time busy stealing some marbles from the Acropolis. And when Lord Castlereagh, responsible for the vicious suppression of the Irish uprising of 1798, died in 1822, Byron composed a heartfelt elegy:

Posterity will ne’er survey?

A nobler grave than this,?

Here lie the bones of Castlereagh

Stop, traveller, and piss.

Meeting Lord Byron in 1812 was quite possibly the worst thing that could have happened to Caroline Lamb, who coined the now famous ‘mad, bad, and dangerous to know’ description of Byron. And she was speaking from experience.?

Tired of England and its growing hordes of debt collectors and rejected ex-lovers, he ran off to Switzerland with Percy Shelley and his novelist wife Mary. Yes, she of Frankenstein fame; this was the summer getaway that led to her writing the novel. Byron was now working on his magnum opus: Don Juan. It was 16,000 lines long and …scandalous. The reviews called him immoral, with one magazine saying:

‘this miserable man has drained the cup of sin even to its bitterest dregs ... he is no longer a human being ... but a cool unconcerned fiend, laughing with a detestable glee over the whole of the better and worse elements of which human life is composed - treating well-nigh with equal derision the most pure of virtues, and the most odious of vices - dead alike to the beauty of the one, and the deformity of the other — a mere heartless despiser ... whose type was never exhibited in a shape of more deplorable degradation than in his own contemptuously distinct delineation of himself’.

Now, that’s pretty intense for a book review!

Then, in 1824, at 36 —yes, all this drama happened before he was 36 —Byron was invited by Greek revolutionaries to help them overthrow the Ottoman Empire. Byron was captivated by Greece’s brutal struggle for independence. He was to lead an attack despite the fact that his entire military credentials could be summed up as ‘accidentally inherited a title; is rich’.

Last Friday was Byron’s 200th death anniversary. One of the most famous poets of his age died (of typhoid) fighting for Greek freedom in the marshes of Missolonghi, barely 100 days after arriving in the land whose liberty he had championed so vociferously. Although he wanted to be buried in Greece, his lungs and larynx remained there but pals carried the rest back to England, where his body was refused a plot in Westminster due to his ‘questionable morality’.

Since his death, Byron has become many things….a figure of brooding intensity and capable of great acts of kindness, yet prone to self-destructive behaviour with lots of emotional baggage. This archetype has found a home in global pop culture: Erik in The Phantom of the Opera (1909), James Dean as the popular Jim Stark in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), the brooding vampire in The Vampire Diaries (1991-2014) and the Twilight series (2005-08), Targaryen in the Game of Thrones, and of course Severus Snape from the Harry Potter series. In Greece, he was a hero. The Acropolis Museum in Athens is currently holding an exhibition on Lord Elgin’s seizure of the Parthenon sculptures. In England, he became the closest thing the Brits ever had to a Casanova with little excitement surrounding his death bicentenary.

Was the revolutionary spirit that led Byron into the war much bigger than his flaws or the whiff of scandal that pushed him into self-exile?

It was an appreciation that the Greeks made it a point of display last Friday. In a country where almost every city has a street named after the poet and many men are called Vyrona in his honour, the hero’s status remains undimmed. “Byron may not have fought but he gave us his everything, he gave us his life,” the mayor explained. “In life it’s all about what you leave behind, and he left behind a free Greece. Without him it might not have happened.”

200 years on, is it time for a reappraisal…to get to know Byron better as a poet, for the Brits to look beyond the clichés, to see his contribution to the creation of a European nation state?