Includes bibliographical references and index.

How important to Byron was the love of men - a love he found celebrated in classical literature? And how did his contemporaries regard such relations? Making use of previously unpublished letters from the poet and his circle, Louis Crompton traces Byron's many homoerotic involvements, from his idealistic schoolboy enthusiasms to the unhappy love affair he was embroiled in at the end of his life. Professor Crompton argues that Byron's homosexuality was a motive for his first journey to Greece and his later ostracism and exile from England, and an important source for the mood of proud alienation that colours his serious poetry.