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These Respected Figures Were Also Some of the Weirdest People in History

Khalid Elhassan August 8, 2022 39 min

16. A Romantic Poet’s Romantic – Kinda – End

Lady Caroline Lamby, by Thomas Lawrence, 1828. Art UK

Fed up with Lady Caroline Lamb’s ceaseless pursuit and celebrity stalking, Lord Byron penned her a diss poem.

Remember thee! remember thee!
Till Lethe quench life’s burning stream
Remorse and shame shall cling to thee,
And haunt thee like a feverish dream!
Remember thee! Aye, doubt it not.
Thy husband too shall think of thee:
By neither shalt thou be forgot,
Thou false to him, thou fiend to me!

Mounting scandals – especially the one with his sister – eventually made Britain too hot for Bryon.

Weird - Byron's death — The death of Lord Byron. Wikimedia

So the Romantic poet hit the road, and roamed Europe for years at a stretch. That included a seven year stint in Italy. Restlessness eventually led him to join the Greeks in their war of independence from the Ottoman Turks. However, he was disappointed with the Greeks of his day, because they differed greatly from the heroic Hellenes described by Homer. As he moped about that discrepancy, Byron caught a fever and died in a Greek backwater at the age of thirty six.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.