Essays on literary works - 2024

Love of Freedom in the Works of J. Byron

George Byron was one of the founders and most prominent representatives of literary and philosophical Romanticism. This movement first declared the self-worth of the creative individual, contrasting it with the cautious, conservative dictatorship of mediocrity. The tragic rift between the individual and society, the poet's misunderstanding and loneliness, and his right to self-realization not only in literature but also in personal life—these were the values that formed the basis of Byron's work.

Byron's striving for freedom was not a poetic declaration. The poet not only sympathized with freedom fighters; he personally participated in the liberation war of the Greek people. Byron saw heroes and death with his own eyes. In the poem "Thou art gone from life," he addresses a hero who selflessly fought for freedom. Death for one's people, one's native land—the path of any soldier, but none of them will be forgotten:

While Freedom's fame thy deeds shall blend

With Greece's name, thou shalt not die,

That blood which thou hast shed is blend

With what still flows or shall flow free.

The hero should not be mourned; his feat should be celebrated. Only then will his name be preserved for centuries and not be forgotten into oblivion:

No tears shall dim our manly eyes;

For Greece has wept on heroes' graves.

Byron died in Greece. The people mourned him as a national hero. The English poet never considered himself a hero; he simply fought against enslavement shoulder to shoulder with ordinary people, sang in verse of the courage and reason of man, loved and cherished life as the only gift that cannot be repeated but can be glorified.