Yet MacCarthy’s Byron: Life and Legend inspires just the opposite thought: that there is so much that one does not want to hear again. Never has a dead poet lived on so successfully without his poetry. Everyone seems to agree that the making of a celebrity (somewhere he must have been called a ‘cultural icon’) is fascinating enough in itself. In the Guardian the historian Kathryn Hughes thought that ‘Byron was indeed someone special,’ but ‘not, perhaps, because of his poetry, which is hardly read now.’ Coinciding with this biography, an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know: The Cult of Lord Byron, confirmed the allure of the poet’s ‘life and legend’. Judging by the immediate critical response to Fiona MacCarthy’s biography, the appetite for Byron’s life is indeed sharpened by all the stories we already have. Here was a story that would excite us because of what we already thought we knew. ‘Everything you’ve ever heard about him is true,’ the husky female voice-over promised. The trailer for the recent BBC dramatisation of Byron’s life made no bones about the poet’s appeal.
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