Lord Byron, His Mother, and Greece1

Byron exercized a deep and lasting influence on modern European culture. The British poet and “aristocratic rebel,” as Bertrand Russell (1945) calls him in his History of Western Philosophy, gave bold and passionate expression to the restlessness of the times, inspiring writers and politicians—and, through them, social-political action—up to the present. Byron himself became a myth, creating a novel image of man, the image of the romantic hero, which he immortalized with his art and his own personal example when he died in revolutionary Greece. “As a myth,” according to Russell (1945, 752) again, “his importance, especially on the Continent, was enormous.” Byron's love for ancient Greece and his identification with the cause of the Greek War of Independence became part of the myth, which had underneath it the notion of a fatal flaw and the wish to repair it by uniting with the ideal mother

George Noel Gordon, the sixth Lord Byron, was born in London on January 22, 1788, and died in Missolonghi, Greece, on April 19, 1824. An only son, he grew up under marginal social and material conditions in provincial Scotland. His father, nicknamed “Mad Jack,” was a soldier of fortune who drank heavily and wondered abroad, pursuing women of beauty or money. He quarrelled constantly with Byron's mother—his second wife—and moved out of the house when the boy was barely two years old. The following year he left for revolutionary France, where he died a few months later, destitute and in despair. Like his famous son, he despised authority and women, being rebellious for the sake of being rebellious, and yearning for love never to find enough