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On the 200th anniversary of Byron's death, two new books

On the 200th anniversary of his death, two new books explore the life and work of the poet who inspired the Byronic hero — proud, introspective and magnetic.

Except for Napoleon, Byron could have legitimately claimed to be the most famous person of his time, partly because he’d been branded — by the infatuated (and married) Caroline Lamb — as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” Not only a major poet, especially in his mock epic “Don Juan,” he was also one of the half-dozen best letter writers in English. The poets only scribbled fragments before giving up, but Polidori produced “The Vampyre” — a novella that reimagined a traditional folk-monster as a Byron look-alike, the suavely aristocratic Lord Ruthven — and Mary Shelley began work on the most influential of all Gothic novels, “Frankenstein.” In due course, Clairmont gave birth to the blue-eyed Allegra, who would succumb to a fever at age 5. While his Weltschmerz-infused lyrics — “She walks in beauty like the night,” “So we’ll go no more a-roving,” “Maid of Athens, ere we part” — are anthology standards, he truly excels at the satirical long poem, such as “The Vision of Judgment” (it opens “Saint Peter sat by the celestial gate:/ His keys were rusty, and the lock was dull”) and the endlessly entertaining “Don Juan,” the erotic adventures of its rather hapless Spanish hero, recounted by a jaded narrator who insists, “I sketch your world exactly as it goes.”

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