Publisher's Synopsis
George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron FRS (1788-1824), known simply as Lord Byron, was an English poet, peer, and politician, who became a revolutionary in the Greek War of Independence, and is considered one of the leading figures of the Romantic movement of his era. Regarded as one of the greatest English poets, he remains widely read and influential. His best known works are the lengthy narrative poems Don Juan and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. He travelled extensively across Europe, spending seven years living in the Italian cities of Venice, Ravenna and Pisa where his friend and fellow-poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was a frequent visitor. He died aged 36 after contracting a fever whilst leading a campaign against the Ottoman Empire, and is revered as a national hero by the Greeks. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage was published in four parts between 1812-18 and describes the reflections of a world-weary young man who, disillusioned with a life of pleasure and revelry, looks for distraction in foreign lands. In a wider sense it is an expression of the melancholy felt by a generation worn down by the wars of the post-Revolutionary and Napoleonic era. The term 'childe' is a medieval title for a young man who was a candidate for knighthood.
