Birth Place: Aberdeen, Scotland
Birth Name: George Gordon Noel
Byronic is an allusion to his literary style. Enormously attractive to women, despite a slight limp, dashing and adventurous, surrounded by glamorous friends, rebelling against conventional morality in his poetry and his life, Byron was the quintessential romantic. Much of Byron's tempestuous life and loves finds expression in the archetypical Byronic hero of such poems as Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Don Juan.
He was also an outspoken politician in the House of Lords. In 1812, workers in the weaving industry in Nottinghamshire were rioting and destroying machinery because of poor wages and working conditions. The Tories introduced a bill to punish the destruction of weaving machinery by death. Byron fiercely opposed the bill, speaking on behalf of workers' rights, and he published a poem on the topic that said, in part, "Some folks for certain have thought it was shocking, / When Famine appeals, and when Poverty groans, / That life should be valued at less than a stocking, / And breaking of frames lead to breaking of bones." Byron wrote many more books of poetry, including Don Juan (1819). When he died at age 36, several interested parties burned his unpublished memoirs before he'd even been buried.
~Writer's Almanac
