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by Geoff Wijesinghe

The Victorian age is considered the golden age of English poetry. It produced poets of the calibre of William Wordsworth, William Blake, John Keats, Lord Byron, William Butler Yeats, Percy Bysshe Shelly, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning and many of their ilk.

Today, I thought of writing about two of the more brilliant poets of that era - John Keats who lived from 1795 to 1821 and died at the young age of only 26, and of Lord Byron.

To me, the most touching was the life of John Keats. Keats' life and career were short, but brilliant. He was born on October 31, 1795 in London, the first child of a head hustler, who took care of guests' horses, at a livery stable.

He died when John was only nine. In 1803, Keats entered Clarke School at Enfield, where he befriended Charles Cowdan, the headmaster's son, who encouraged Keats' reading of poetry.

After spending his holidays nursing her, Keats saw his mother die to tuberculosis in 1810. This disease eventually killed his brother, his grandmother as well as Keats himself. Keats' guardian, Richard Abbey, apprenticed the boy to be an apothecary-surgeon. John eventually studied medicine and received a certificate to practise in 1816. On reaching the age of 21, he informed his guardian that he intended to take to full-time poetry.

Though be began to write poetry three years earlier, Keats was introduced by Clarke to Leigh Hunt's literary circle. The same year, he produced two poems of major promise, "on First Looking Into Chapman's Homer" and "Sleep and Poetry".

Keats and Shelly received high praise in an article in the "Examiner". Three lines from "Sleep and Poetry" are significant to Keats' short career.

O for ten years,

that I may overwhelm

Myself and Poesy;

so I may do the deed

That my own soul

has to itself decreed

To me,

his most beautiful lines are

Truth is beauty; beauty truth

He published "Endymion", which was based on the Greek legend of the Lover of the Moon goddess for a mortal.

At this time, personal and family difficulties began to cloud the life of John Keats. Although his father had left the family a rather large estate, it was tied up in a Chancery (the High Court in Britain) suit for all Keats' lifetime.

In addition to financial worries, his brother Tom was dying from tuberculosis. Despite negative criticism in Blackwoods magazine of "Endymion", harsh and irresponsible, Keats authorised "Hyperion" during his brother's last months.

He fell in love with Fanny Brawne, who lived with her widowed mother in Hampstead. He wrote his greatest poems after long walks in the Lade district. They included the perennial famous "The Eve of St. Agnes", "La Belle Dame sans Merci", "Ode to a Nightingale" and "On a Grecian Urn".

Late in 1819, he officially became engaged to Fanny and tragically began to suffer from TB, caught while nursing his brother. He began to undergo lung haemorrhages. On the advice of his doctor, he went to Italy, which has a drier climate.

Keats wanted to commit suicide, but, was prevented from doing so by his friend Joseph Severn. He died on February 21, 1821, and buried in the Protestant cemetery in Rome.

The words on his tombstone read: Here lies one whose name was writ in water. Byron was a legend all over Europe in his own lifetime. His international reputation was greater than that of any British literary contemporary. But, it was based as much as on his personality as on his poetry.

Byron was born in London in 1788, the son of a famous rake (dissipater), known as "Mad Jack" Byron and a rich Scottish heiress of uneven temperament, Catherine Gordon. Byron was born with a clubfoot, an affliction to which he remained sensitive all his life. But, never really seemed to diminish his social attractiveness, particularly to the opposite sex.

He was sexually precocious, conceiving passions for two distant female cousins when he was nine.

At the age of 10, he succeeded to the title of his great uncle the "Wicked" Lord Byron and inherited the ancestral estate of Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire. He studied at Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge.

Although he read widely at the university in English literature, history and books of travel, his main interest seemed to be the fashionable dissipation of a Regency lord.

He took his seat at the House of Lords at 1809, and published his first important poem, the satire "English Bards and Reviewers" in which he ridiculed Wordsworth and Coleridge. He took a tour of the Mediterranean region to escape the fireworks caused by his satire.

He suddenly found himself lionised in the best drawing rooms. Possibly he was describing himself to some extent when in a poem "Child Harold", he described a melancholy young aristocrat with a proud, somewhat self-dramatising attitude.

The public interpreted this poem as a description of himself. In spite of his denials, his reading audience insisted that it was large autobiographical. As one mistress put it, "the poem was mad, bad and dangerous to know."

He was besieged by women and had numerous affairs. His most notorious liaison was with the eccentric Lady Caroline Lamb. In January 1815, the poet married Isabelle Millbanke; she was rich, beautiful, intelligent, morally earnest and unfortunately naive. They had a bitter separation after one year. Though he denied it, he was accused of having a love affair with his half sister Augusta Leigh.

Virtually ostracised due to his immorality, Byron went to the continent and never returned to England. Finally in 1819, he settled into a liaison with the 19-year-old countess Teresa Guiccioli, who gave a steadiness, which he had never before.

Here is a verse from one of his poems She Walks In Beauty:

She walks in beauty,

like the night

Of cloudless climes and

starry skies;

And all that's best of

dark and bright

Meet in her aspect and her eyes:

Thus mellowed to

that tender light

Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

He died on April 1, 1824.

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