Had he lived longer, Byron might have been the greatest of the Romantic poets; he was more worldly and experienced than his friends, and would probably have matured into a greater poet, like Yeats. Unfortunately, he followed Keats and Shelley to an early grave. Byron's best work, Don Juan, is an extremely long poem, but also very clever and funny ('Hatred is by far the greatest pleasure/Men love in haste, but they detest at leisure').

Overrated by the general public and not especially well-regarded by the scholarly set, who are, after all, the ones truly in the know. I consider this guy to be a borderline hack who displays little in the way of intellectual depth, poetic inventiveness, stylistic innovation, etc. He's imitative in form, a subscriber to a type of poetry that was chauvantistic, hero-worshipful, backward-looking, and deliberately so. Byron's work was unduly considered advanced and new in its time, although actually it was little more than a reactionary adoption of poetic sensibility common to his era that was a mere contradiction to the ethos of the neoclassical. He was nowhere near the poet of his major contemporaries, Shelley, Blake, Wordsworth and Keats. But he was a prototypical romantic figure, no doubt.

inspired all the REAL gothic music of today. only the REAL gothic music mind.

"Mad,bad and dangerous to know" he was described as.He scandalised early 19th century English society with his failed marriage and womanising-no wonder the epic Don Juan is considered his best by many.He left England for Greece,organising military forces fighting for independence there,but died of fever aged 36(in 1824).I personally find Byron's work a mixed bag,but there are moments of sheer brilliance.The Destruction of Sennacherib- "The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,/And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;/And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,/When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee..."- is one of my very favourites.