Romantic poet George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) was born on this day in London, England, an aristocrat with a restless soul and a limp from birth who would soon outrun convention. He inherited the title Lord Byron at age ten, but his true crown was imagination.

He devoured books, translated Horace at six, and by twenty-four set Europe ablaze with Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812). “Mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” whispered society, yet readers could not look away.

In 1816, on the shores of Lake Geneva, Byron welcomed Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin into the legendary “haunted summer.” Their midnight storytelling challenge gave rise to Mary’s Frankenstein and Byron’s eerie Fragment of a Novel, a spark of gothic imagination.

Also at the villa was his young physician, John William Polidori, who expanded Byron’s fragment into The Vampyre, the first modern vampire tale. Together, their flickering pens illuminated a shadowy new genre that still breathes today.

Byron’s poetry blazed with freedom, beauty, and unsparing truth. In Don Juan (1819–1823) he wielded wit like a rapier, and in Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte (1814) he skewered tyranny. In every line he pursued the boundless “dark blue sea” of the soul.

In 1823 he sailed to Greece, trading velvet salons for rebel camps. “I want a hero,” he once wrote, and became one, giving fortune and health to the fight for Greek independence. Fever claimed him at Missolonghi in 1824, but his legend only expanded.

He confessed, “I am blood, bone, marrow—passion, feeling.” A fitting reminder that adversity can be the first path of truth. And the daring heart learns to walk the path with wisdom.