George Gordon (Lord Byron) (1788-1824)

While Wordsworth and Coleridge wrote about Romanticism, Lord Byron  lived it. His exuberant bisexuality, his personal beauty (he wore curlers in his hair at night), and his profligate lifestyle seemed to embody perfectly the new doomed hero, alienated from society but superior to it. He feigned athleticism (he had a clubfoot) and threw himself into the Greek war against the Turks by paying to refit the Greek ships. In fact, his poetry, received with such adulation, was less Romantic than any of his peers. In Don Juan, his masterpiece, he attacked government, church, and marriage in iambic pentameter more reminiscent of Milton, Pope, and Dryden, the very champions of authority.

Immortal Poets: Their Lives and Verse, by Christopher Burns