BYRON, GEORGE GORDON BYRON, 6TH BARON

born Jan. 22, 1788, London, Eng. died April 19, 1824, Missolonghi, Greece byname Lord Byron English Romantic poet and satirist whose poetry and personality captured the imagination of Europe. Renowned as the gloomy egoist of his autobiographical poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (181218) in the 19th century, he is now more generally esteemed for the satiric realism of Don Juan (181924). Additional reading The standard edition of Byron's poems is The Complete Poetical Works, ed. by Jerome J. McGann, 7 vol. (198093), with valuable information on the poems and their composition. Byron's Letters and Journals, ed. by Leslie A. Marchand, 12 vol. (197381), contains many newly discovered letters. A generous sampling is given in Lord Byron: Selected Letters and Journals, ed. by Leslie A. Marchand (1982). A standard modern biography is Leslie A. Marchand, Byron, 3 vol. (1957), which is abridged and updated in his Byron: A Portrait (1970, reissued 1993). More recent biographical discoveries are in Doris Langley Moore, Lord Byron: Accounts Rendered (1974); and Malcolm Elwin, Lord Byron's Wife (1962, reissued 1974). Works of criticism include M.K. Joseph, Byron: The Poet (1964); Leslie A. Marchand, Byron's Poetry: A Critical Introduction (1965); Robert F. Gleckner, Byron and the Ruins of Paradise (1967, reprinted 1980); Edward E. Bostetter (ed.), Twentieth Century Interpretations of Don Juan (1969); Jerome J. McGann, Don Juan in Context (1976); and Peter J. Manning, Byron and His Fictions (1978). Andrew Rutherford (compiler), Byron: The Critical Heritage (1970), collects 19th-century critiques; while Robert F. Gleckner (ed.), Critical Essays on Lord Byron (1991), contains studies from 1960 on.