Our good friend and role model Lord Byron is back in D.P.S. news today. If you’ll remember all the way back to Wednesday of this week, we toasted to Byron’s controversial divorce. Today, we pour some out for the ultimate Romantic bad boy (think of him as the 19th-century equivalent of a rock star who’d smash his lute, bed your sister, and then write a 12-stanza ode about it, who died on this day in 1824 at the age of 36 in Missolonghi, Greece, a fetid swamp of a town that sounds like the setting for a Gothic novel but was, in fact, the backdrop for his final, quixotic stand against tyranny. As mentioned on Wednesday, this poet lived hard – scandalous affairs, exile from England, a pen that bled rebellion in words like Don Juan and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, this latter a 500-page primal scream against the Ottoman Empire, aristocratic ennui, and the general cosmic unfairness of it all. Byron was a one-man insurgency, a walking middle finger to the buttoned-up propriety of Regency England. He’d already lived harder than most of us could manage in three lifetimes – exiled for what we’ll politely call “indiscretions” that involved more than a few raised eyebrows at Almack’s, penning works like Don Juan (a sprawling, digressive beast of a poem that’s basically the literary equivalent of a Netflix binge) and Childe Harold while simultaneously bankrolling the Greek fight for independence from the Ottomans. Imagine it: Byron, in his velvet cloak and with his Byronic sneer, handing over fistfuls of cash to a ragtag band of Greek revolutionaries, all while scribbling verses that bled rebellion and melancholy in equal measure. But here’s where the story takes its inevitable nosedive into the abyss of irony so dark it’d give Kafka gas. Byron, having thrown his lot in with the Greeks, contracts a fever – possibly malaria, though the historical record is as murky as the Missolonghi marshes themselves. The doctors, in an egregious display of medical malpractice decide the best course of action is to bleed him. With leeches. They drain him of half his blood, which, if you’ve ever read a single page of medical history, you’ll know is the 19th-century equivalent of treating a headache with a sledgehammer. Byron, already weakened from his fever and probably a lifetime of hard living (the man’s diet was a mix of vinegar, laudanum, and sheer spite), doesn’t stand a chance. He dies, delirious and pale, leaving behind a legacy that’s equal parts genius and chaos.
The Greeks, to their credit, know a hero when they see one. They give him a funeral fit for a demigod – less “cozy Westminster Abbey plot” and more “Homeric pyre on the shores of the Aegean.” Back in England, though, the establishment can’t handle the sheer Byron-ness of it all. Westminster Abbey refuses his body, because apparently being a poetic genius and a freedom fighter isn’t enough to offset the scandal of, you know, sleeping with half of London and maybe your half-sister[^1]. His publisher, in a move that’s equal parts cowardice and betrayal, burns his memoirs, memoirs that were likely the literary equivalent of a nuclear bomb. They “protect” his legacy, they say, which is code for “we’re terrified of what this man’s unfiltered truth would do to our delicate sensibilities.” It’s an act that’s been called one of the worst literary crimes ever, and I’m inclined to agree…imagine if someone torched the only copy of Ulysses because Joyce was “too weird.” That’s the level of cultural vandalism we’re talking about here.
Byron lived with the reckless abandon of a man who knew he was destined to burn out rather than fade away, and burn out he did – in a swamp in Greece, fighting for a cause that wasn’t even his own, because that’s just how Byron rolled. His death was a seismic even, a rupture in the fabric of Romanticism that left the world a little less wild, a little less free. So we pour some out and then raise a glass to you, Lord Byron: may your ghost haunt the marshes of Missolonghi, may your verses echo in the halls of eternity, and may the prudes who burned your memoirs choke on their own mediocrity.
[^1]: The incest rumors about Byron and his half-sister Augusta Leigh are, to put it mildly, contested. But they were enough to make polite society clutch their pearls and banish him, which, let’s be real, probably just made him more insufferable—and more brilliant.
N.P.: “Talking To Myself” – Manosaurus
