Some years ago I worked on 6 of the 7 volumes of The Works of Lord Byron for the Project Gutenberg editions [1], which entailed careful reading of every line. Which led to reading the Fiona McCarthy biography. Yeah, he was a shit no doubt, but he had an astounding, rarely-equalled talent as well. Verse just poured out of him. He had a high intelligence and great sensitivity to emotional nuance -- those are common enough qualities -- but was utterly unique in that, whatever he thought, he could express in perfectly-chosen words fit to exact meter and rhyme.
I recently read that there was a surge in Lord Byron’s popularity in the USA in the 1920s and 1930s. I find that so hard to believe. It must have simply vanished from American consciousness without a trace after the war (Stefan Zweig’s novels are a similar case).
How many American schoolchildren in the last several decades read any Byron? Even at the university level, I never read him directly, I only heard some things about him that were mainly negative, like his sexism, or his role in insisting that a newly independent Greece revive the Ancient Greek culture that Western Europeans expected from it, when it fact Greece had been a deeply Orthodox Christian society for 1500 years and all those pagan gods and Athenian or Spartan values had long been forgotten.
For what value of "last several"? Honestly, I'm not at this point sure whether I read any Byron in high school English. I have the impression that he was very popular in the US curriculum until the modernists devalued the romantics.
I never knew Byron was such a dick until reading this. I don't find it all romantic or exciting at all, just a sad account of an untreated person with bipolar disorder.
[1] http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=works+of+lord+...
[2] https://smile.amazon.com/Byron-Life-Legend-Fiona-MacCarthy/d...