The early years of a pair of literary rebels

Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, quintessential poets who helped define the period of late British Romanticism, led short lives of intrigue and uproar that reached a high point in the friendship the two rebels came to share. “The Making of the Poets” by British writer Ian Gilmour is a dual-strand biography examining the poets’ early years, before they met and fully developed their art.

“Their lives were full of extraordinary incident and controversy,” Gilmour writes in his introduction. “They lived, too, in interesting times, and not merely in the sense of the Chinese curse -- ‘May you live in interesting times’ -- because they lived through the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, but also in the sense that their era was one of intellectual and artistic as well as political turmoil.”

The chapters alternate from a focus on Byron to one on Shelley, exploring each poet’s young life and the family heritage to which he was born. We learn that though Lord Byron was of an aristocratic family, his father was a spendthrift whose extravagant lifestyle hemorrhaged much of the family’s wealth in short order. Sexually preyed upon by his nanny, Byron was alternately loved and berated by his erratic mother; his mostly absent father died (possibly a suicide) when Byron was a young boy. While still a lad, Byron inherited land and a title.

Shelley, also of aristocratic bearing if not of pedigree, was mostly ignored and neglected by his parents. His mother, we learn, had a special grievance against Shelley “because he preferred reading books to killing animals. Brought up in a sporting household, she was determined to instill proper habits into her elder son.” There was so little regard for Shelley in his home life that even a decade after his death, his sisters were not allowed to mention his name.

The men had vastly different experiences of boarding school and university, which the author describes in painstaking detail, yet both went on to develop similarly insurgent characters. They embraced religious skepticism -- a shocking stance in their time -- lived by libertine principles, and assumed the posture of bad-boy rebels against the establishment. Shelley, for instance, was expelled from Oxford after he anonymously published a pamphlet on “The Necessity of Atheism.” And Byron, who spent little of his university tenure actually studying or attending lectures, choosing instead to drink and carouse, would go on to pen “Don Juan,” a long satirical poem tackling the social values and sexual mores of the day, and in doing so, create the Byronic hero of literature.

Some of the most interesting details are the small, quirky things we learn about the poets, like the fact that Byron, while at university, kept a pet bear. “Byron had noticed while the Trinity statutes forbade the keeping of a dog, they said nothing about other animals.” When asked what he meant to do with the bear, Byron “replied that ‘it should sit for a fellowship.’ ”

When Shelley went on his honeymoon with the 16-year-old innkeeper’s daughter with whom he eloped -- he would later marry Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, author of “Frankenstein” -- he made room for his best friend Hogg, who joined the couple a few days after the wedding. “Not only did Shelley welcome Hogg’s gatecrashing, he extended it.” Shelley, we learn, needed a buffer between himself and a wife or lover.

Gilmour leads readers up to the year 1812, when Byron was 23 and Shelley 19, a full four years before the pair met. The narrative does not consider in detail how exactly Byron and Shelley grew to be poets, nor examine how their friendship would come to influence their lives and their contributions to the development of late Romanticism.

While Gilmour’s approach is fascinating in theory, its execution leaves the casual reader wishing for more context. The narrative is very detailed, perhaps too much so for lay readers to fully appreciate how all the pieces fit together. Had the book included a broad overview of the poets’ complete lives -- a sense of how the minute facts would build, eventually transforming unruly schoolboys into influential poets -- it might have been a more compelling read. As it stands, the minutiae become tedious for readers who are not experts on Byron and Shelley and who must struggle to make the data add up to a pair of compelling human lives.

The premise of exploring their young years is fascinating, but without a more complete sense of the larger picture, many readers may feel as if they’re missing out.