Lord Byron

Lord Byron was an English poet, a defining figure of European Romanticism. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage made him famous in 1812, and the verse tales that followed, The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos and The Corsair, won him a European reputation with their wild emotion, exotic settings and brooding heroes. Forced to leave England, he spent seven years in Italy, where he wrote much of Don Juan, left unfinished. His writings have given rise to more than forty operas, Verdi's Il corsaro and I due Foscari among them. He died at Missolonghi in 1824 in the Greek War of Independence.