An Introduction to ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’: Poems in Honour of Lord Byron for the Bicentenary Year of His Death
On 16 July 1824, two hundred years ago today, the one and only Lord Byron was buried within his family vault at the Church of St Mary Magdalene in Hucknall, Nottinghamshire.
Byron led a most extraordinary life. He was a celebrity in every sense of the word, famed for his poetry just as much as he was infamous for his personality, the latter, according to his own words, was ‘so changeable, being everything by turns and nothing long — I am such a strange mélange of good and evil, that it would be difficult to describe me.’ And yet described he was, frequently, in life and in death, by many notable characters including Lady Caroline Lamb (whom Byron had a scandalous affair with) who rather infamously described him as ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’, and even Mary Shelley who, knowing him as a friend, understood his more positive contradictions, describing him as a ‘fascinating — faulty — childish — philosophical being’ who, quite characteristically, ‘[dared] the world’, and yet she continues that he was ‘docile in a private circle — impetuous and indolent — gloomy and yet more gay than any other’.
The contradictions in Byron’s own persona — captivating, yet tragically flawed — paired brilliantly well with characters from his poetry, notably the titular characters from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812-1818) and Manfred (1817), and, perhaps especially, in the character of Conrad from The Corsair (1814) which sold ten thousand copies on its first day of publication. Although Bryon denied the association of a ‘real personage’, writing that ‘Harold is the child of imagination’, the reading public was fascinated and believed these tragically romantic characters were based on Byron himself, and thus the literary archetype of the Byronic Hero was born. Byron epitomised these romantic characteristics of the solitary figure tortured by some unknown secret, the ‘sublime misanthrope’, mercurial, cynical, egotistical, the brooding romantic of ‘loneliness and mystery, / Scarce seen to smile, and seldom heard to sigh’, and yet intensely passionate, talented in every way, and capable of deep feeling.
There is much to write about Lord Byron, and we only wanted to include these brief paragraphs within this introduction to illustrate aspects of his character and, well, ‘Byronic qualities’ that continue to captivate us all.
Without further ado, we at Gothic Keats Press are excited to announce the publication today of a collection of poems that celebrate Byron, which we have titled ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’: Poems in Honour of Lord Byron for the Bicentenary Year of His Death.
We are proud of this collection, and we hope you enjoy it as much as we did putting it all together. Here’s to Byron!
Sincerely yours,
The Editors
Clay Franklin Johnson and Olivia Claire Louise Newman