Lord Byron

Poets of vision and revolution, the Romantics rejected the established political and social values of the 18th century. The Romantic age occurred against the setting of the French Revolution. Both represented freedom and a shift in society’s values and concerns. Lord Byron was among the most famous of the England’s Romantic poets. His unwillingness, or perhaps inability, to conform to society, and his acceptance of the Romantic values, individualism, freedom, imagination and nature, is reflected in his poetry. The poems, Darkness and She Walks in Beauty, can be seen to reflect such values.

Romanticism saw a radical change in attitude towards the value of the individual. Romantics were interested in the feeling, not the facts. In the poem Darkness, Byron describes the different responses of man, at a time when death seems imminent. Some “hid their eyes and wept”, others “hurried to and fro”, while “some did rest chins upon clenched hands and smiled”. He expresses the...