Word: byronic
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...farthest extreme of Europe, he committed the master symbol of the Romantic movement. "This morning," he exulted, "I swam from Sestos to Abydos." And then, being Byron, he saw the funny side of it: "The immediate distance [across the Hellespont] is not above a mile, but the current renders it hazardous, so much so that I doubt whether Leander's conjugal affection must not have been a little chilled in his passage...
...Windows. Back home, Byron plunged into a round of affairs with the most famous beauties in England. After four years of it, he married Annabella Milbanke, the cousin of Lord Melbourne, "the most silent woman I ever encountered," he wrote with some concern. "I like them to talk, because then they think less." His wedding, however, "went off very pleasantly, all but the [kneeling] cushions, which were stuffed with peach-stones, I believe, and made me make a face which passed for piety." In the next year Byron lived in a peace of spirit that is most purely appreciable...
Then the marriage exploded in one of the worst scandals of the age. Annabella left Byron, and the word went around that she had discovered a love affair between her husband and his half-sister. A storm of public opinion drove Byron out of England, never to return. In Italy, he settled down as the lover of a draper's wife, Marianna Segati, wrote much verse (including most of his masterpiece, Don Juan) and many disgusted letters back to England about "the destruction with which my moral Clytemnestra hewed me down." But women he could not escape. They choked...
Letter from Missolonghi. "I feel," wrote Byron's better self, "and I feel it bitterly, that a man should not consume his life at the side and on the bosom of a woman, and a stranger . . . But I have neither the strength of mind to break my chain, nor the insensibility which would deaden its weight...
...when Byron was 35, he found the strength, in his passionate belief in human liberty, to break his chain. He went to fight for the Greeks in their war of liberation from the Turks. In the midst of it all, he still found time to turn out verse and to twit an erring friend back home: "Pray who is the lady? The papers merely inform by dint of asterisks that she is somebody's wife and has children ... It is to be hoped that the jury will be bachelors...