Culture

I love you, Lord Byron

by Paul Conneally | August 14, 2008 at 07:22 am

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Poets these days rarely make the headlines and their fans are not generally the knicker throwing variety that bomb the stage of pop icons such as Tom Jones and his modern counterparts with underwear and love letters yet Byron would seem to have had that appeal and many many what we would now call groupies.

There's a long way to go before citizen jounalists and bloggers get this kind of love from their readers but who knows?!

Lord Byron, the Romantic poet, was one of the first celebrities to receive a deluge of fan mail from anonymous women whose amorous epistles he treasured, research has revealed.

The unpublished letters show the ardour of Byron's fans, who often laced their notes with daring sexual undertones and breathless fantasies. Contrary to the popular opinion of Byron as an aloof and reclusive poet who did not invite public adoration, the letters suggest that he relished being adored and wrote suggestive poetry that "flirted" with his readers, inviting them to respond in kind.

The letters, dated between 1812 and 1814, were studied for the first time by Corin Throsby, an academic at Oxford University.