Selected Poems

He woke up one morning to find himself the most famous poet in Europe. His long poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage had been published overnight, and Lord Byron — twenty-four, handsome, aristocratic, and possessed of a talent that seemed almost indecent in its facility — found himself at the centre of a cultural storm that would never really subside. The Byronic hero — moody, magnetic, tormented, brilliant — was born, and it remade European culture.

This Penguin Classics selected edition gathers the essential range of Byron’s achievement: the early poems that made his reputation, the Hebrew Melodies that show his lyric gift at its purest, ‘The Prisoner of Chillon’, ‘Darkness’, and key passages from Don Juan — the great comic epic that many critics now consider his masterpiece. The scholarly introduction and notes place each poem in its biographical and historical context.

Byron was not just a poet — he was a phenomenon. To read him is to encounter a voice of astonishing vitality and wit, as contemporary as anything written this century. Published by Penguin Classics.