George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, FRS (Fellow of the Royal Society) was born January 22, 1788, and died April 19, 1824. He is commonly known as Lord Byron.

He was a peer and a politician, but he is mostly known as one of the greatest British poets and a leading figure in the Romantic movement. Among his best-known works are the lengthy narrative poems Don Juan and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and the short lyric poem "She Walks in Beauty". He remains widely read and influential.

Byron travelled extensively across Europe, especially in Italy, where he lived for seven years in Venice, Ravenna, and Pisa, where he had a chance to frequent his friend the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. 

He died only 36 years old from a fever contracted while in Missolonghi. Byron is often described as the most flamboyant and notorious of the major Romantics, and he was both celebrated and castigated in life for his aristocratic excesses, including huge debts, numerous love affairs - with men as well as women, as well as rumours of a scandalous liaison with his half-sister - and self-imposed exile.