Lord Byron Was More Than Just Byronic
Two centuries after his death, the works of the great Romantic poet reveal a sensibility whose restless meld of humor and melancholy feels thoroughly contemporary.
By Anthony Lane
People who have never read a line of Byron’s verse may still have heard that he was “mad—bad—and dangerous to know.”
But Byron was Byronic. One observer, Lady Mildmay, is said to have felt the full force:
Once, when he spoke to her in a doorway, her heart beat so violently that she could hardly answer him. She said it was not only her awe of his great talents, but the peculiarity of a sort of under look he used to give, that produced this effect upon her.
Then, there was Lady Falkland, the widow of a friend. “It is not a loveless heart I offer you, but a heart where every throb beats responsive to your own,” she wrote to Byron, in 1812, after “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” his first hit, had commenced publication. “I awoke one morning and found myself famous,” he recalled, and that fame seems to have quickened the birth of fan mail. In order to feel the throb, you didn’t need to be a Lady, or even to have met the poet in the flesh. His presence on paper was sufficient, as shown by the outpourings of another reader: “Sir, I have just finished the perusal of your incomparable works—an impulse grateful as irresistible impels me to acknowledge your Pen has called forth the most exquisite feelings I have ever experienced.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/03/04/byron-a-life-in-ten-letters-andrew-stauffer-book-review