The making of the poets

by Ian Hedworth John Little Gilmour

"Rebellious, passionate, wildly defiant ... of convention and authority, the fiery George Gordon, Lord Byron, and fearless Percy Bysshe Shelley would come to epitomize both in their lives and in their poetry the spirit of the Romantic Age. Yet neither of them was born to be a revolutionary." "In this dual biography, the first ever to focus exclusively on the lives of Byron and Shelley as well-born youths nurtured by their politically and socially turbulent times, Ian Gilmour illuminates the darkest corners of their formative years. At ideological odds with traditional values even as young boys, Byron at Harrow and Shelley at Eton found themselves first stultified by and then resistant to authority in any institutional guise. Nor did their brief stints at university - Shelley was expelled from Oxford after publishing The Necessity of Atheism and at Cambridge Byron concentrated mostly on gambling and whoring - prove to be more congenial to their mutinous souls. Indeed, they left their re