Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 4: With His Letters and Journals

The most intimate portrait we have of Byron in his wildest years. Thomas Moore, Byron's confidant and literary executor, assembled these letters and journals to preserve the poet's voice in all its dazzling contradiction: vitriolic, tender, arrogant, aching, frequently hilarious. This volume captures Byron at thirty, in exile, writing from Venice about his health, his travels, his disdain for English society, and the unfinished masterpiece "Manfred" that would define the Romantic archetype of the tortured rebel. Here is Byron commenting on fellow poets with brutal honesty, dreaming of Rome, complaining of illness with black humor, and revealing the creative agony behind the effortless verses. For anyone who has ever wanted to hear Byron speak in his own words, unfiltered by later mythology, this volume is indispensable. It traces the making of a legend by the legend himself, during the years that would cement his status as the Romantic era's most magnetic and maddening voice.