Everything about him was a paradox, insider and outsider, beautiful and deformed, serious and facetious, profligate but on occasion miserly, and possessed of a fierce intelligence trapped however in a child’s magic and malices. What he wrote concerning the poet Robert Burns could easily serve as his own epitaph–‘tenderness, roughness–delicacy, coarseness–sentiment, sensuality…dirt and deity–all mixed up in that one compound of inspired clay’.He was also a gigantic poet, but as he reminds us, poetry is a distinct faculty and has no more to do with the individual than has the pythoness when she is off her tripod. Byron, off his tripod, becomes Byron the Man, who by his own admission could not exist without some object of love. His passions were developed very early and generated excitement, melancholy and foreboding at the loss that was bound to occur in the ‘terrestrial paradise’. He loved men and women, needing the ‘other’, whoever she or he might be. He had only to look at a beautiful face and was ready to ‘build and burn another Troy’.The word Byronic, to this day, connotes excess, diabolical deeds and a rebelliousness answering neither to king nor commoner.
