Byron: The Impossible Hero

Lord Byron was born in poverty, and remained in poverty for most of his life: money-lenders and other debtors paid for his luxurious life-style and his incessant womanizing. Famous overnight on the publishing of his poem 'Childe Harold', he became notorious for his affair with his half-sister - and with several other well-known society women. Fleeing from the women and the debtors, he settled in Venice (where he claimed to make love to over 300 women in the first two years) and eventually settled into semi-domesticity with his last mistress, the Countess Guiccioli. Continuing to scandalize with his agnostic poetry, his poetic fame rests on his masterpiece, 'Don Juan' - his personal life came to an end when he went to Greece (in armour of his own design) to fight for the country's freedom from the Turks, and died of a fever, his last poem written to his klast love, a beautiful Grecian boy.