Byron, Boxing, and the Byronic Hero

Learning about masculinity from a poet who loved to box

My coach regularly warns young boxers not to try to be heroes—or “he-roes,” his word for men who try to beef up their masculinity by putting on a good show, which is not the same as demonstrating good technique. “He-roes” go in for fancy footwork, dancing around in the ring and throwing wild shots. Some moves, such as bobbing and weaving when you are out of range, might look impressive. But they are seldom effective, and they waste energy. The he­-roe is a showman but not a fighter, all sizzle and no steak.

When we think of the hero today we think of Marvel comic characters, flashy figures with exaggerated powers. There is something to these caricatures. “Hero” is from the Greek hērōs, means demi-god, someone born of a god and of a mortal and therefore one with special powers. The hero has qualities that go beyond physical strength and bravery. They include wisdom, good character, and willingness to sacrifice.

The English poet George Gordon, Lord Byron, created his own model of heroism (1788-1824). The Byronic Hero has been seen as a figure for Byron himself, an understandable mistake when we think of a man who wrote satire about heroic masculinity, much of which involves fighting in Turkey and Greece and the writer’s own travels. A Byronic he-roe would be long on promise and short on delivery. Byron himself was an adventurous man who did not display the weaknesses associated with the Byronic hero. They are plainly inconsistent with the poet’s manly accomplishments, including his love of boxing.

An early description of the Byronic hero appears in an 1831 essay by the historian Thomas Babbington Macaulay. He was reviewing Thomas Moore’s biography of Byron, published in 1830. Byron’s heroes “are men who have arrived by different roads at the same goal of despair,” Macaulay wrote. These are men “who are sick of life, who are at war with society, who are supported in their anguish only by an unconquerable pride resembling that of Prometheus on the rock or of Satan in the burning marl [sedimentary rock], who can master their agonies by the force of their will, and who, to the last, defy the whole power of earth and heaven.” In regard to either internal or external attributes, Macaulay does not seem to be describing a masculine man.

Although he was determined, and defiant, and certainly at war with society, Byron was not, in any sense, easily restrained. Nor was he despairing or gloomy. He lived a rich inner life but was also a man of extraordinary action, a combination essential to a masculine man.

Macaulay felt that Byron could create just one kind of man: “a man proud, moody, cynical, with defiance on his brow, and misery in his heart, a scorner of his kind, implacable in revenge, yet capable of deep and strong affection.” This again sounds as if it should be a portrait of Byron. Macaulay recognized Byron’s gifts, after a fashion, but tainted them with the marks of the Byronic hero. “There can be no doubt that this remarkable man owed the vast influence which he exercised over his contemporaries at least as much to his gloomy egotism as to the real power of his poetry,” Macaulay wrote.

Byron was a cultural sensation, but not because of his egotism. There is more to Byron than to the Byronic hero. The poet had a large ego, but we would be hard-pressed to say he was gloomy. In fact, a recent author has claimed Byron as a great comic writer, a description appropriate for a brilliant and inexhaustibly clever satirist (Ellis, Byron, p. 7).

The story that seems most revealing of Byron’s ego we owe to Byron’s contemporary, John Clare, also a poet and also a boxer (1793-1864). A sailor from Clare’s Northamptonshire village kept a journal on a voyage to Constantinople. Clare was asked to copy some of this journal and later remembered a passage about “an odd young man lame of one foot on which he wore a cloth shoe—[a man] who was of a resolute temper, fond of bathing in the sea and going ashore to see ruins [of Troy] in a rough see when it required six hands to manage the boat.” The young man was so demanding that “his name became a bye word in the ship for unnecessary trouble.” He was Byron, described here as he was in 1810, just before he swam the Hellespont, some four miles of open water, in an hour and ten minutes (Bate, John Clare, p. 66; Marchand, p. 82, notes that two weeks of bad weather delay the swim).

Byron believed in revolution and in fighting for just causes. His greatest biographer, Leslie Marchand, writes that Byron had “dream of playing soldier” that came true in Greece (p. 431). On the eve of his death, he commanded a regiment of Greek soldiers when he supported the Greek rebellion against the Ottoman Empire.

A Byronic hero might dream and sulk; Byron himself engaged in daring, adventurous, and dangerous acts. All commentators note that Byron loved to box. He took up the sport after leaving Cambridge in 1807. When he moved to London he took lessons from John Johnson, a famous boxing coach. Few writers who mention Byron’s boxing explore the significance of the poet’s fondness for the ring. I think Byron had four reasons for boxing that every masculine man can learn from.

Discipline was the first reason Byron boxed. He worried about everything, it seems, but especially about his public appearance, including his weight, his clothes, often dieting, often in flamboyant costume. Boxing required discipline, and Byron knew he needed it to learn box. It was more than a gentlemanly pursuit for him.

In “Hints from Horace,” an early work (1811) not published during his life time, Byron paraphrases Horace’s Art Poetica, which explains the art of poetry in poetic form. “The person who does not know how to play forgoes the athletic equipment in the Campus Martius,” says Horace, “and someone who does not know anything about the ball, the discus, or the hoop stays away from the action in order to prevent the packed crowd of spectators from raising their voices in unrestrained laughter.” Note the emphasis on public appearance. Here is Byron’s version:

[Those] who shoot not flying [creatures] rarely touch a gun;

Will he who swims not to the river run?

And men unpractised in exchanging knocks

Must go to Jackson ere they dare to box;

Whate’er the weapon – cudgel, fist, or foil,

None reaches expertness without years of toil. (ll. 635-40)

John Jackson was Byron’s boxing coach. His portrait hung in Byron’s family home (Boddy, pp. 50-51). Boxing requires study and hard work, Byron points out. A man can’t simply seize a weapon; he has to learn how to use it. Boxing demands form. In Don Juan, perhaps his best-known work, the poet refers to Johnson twice (canto 8, canto 11).

Second, Bryon boxed to relieve anxiety and grief. He knew that the sport offered physical relief from psychological stress—as does any form of vigorous exercise. Kasia Boddy notes that Byron boxed after his mother’s funeral in 1811. She points out that John Keats’s friends took him to a boxing match after Keats’s brother died in 1818 (p. 54).

Men like Byron and Keats were concerned with balancing the inner and the outer. They found activity and action to be therapeutic in times of stress. Nothing cures the blues like a good workout, every athlete knows. Vigorous exercise releases endorphins. We work out; we feel better.

The third reason why Byron wanted to box, and drove himself to excel at other sports as well, including fencing and swimming, was physical. He was born with a deformed right foot, a fact that has been the subject of much speculation. Some assume that he had a clubfoot; other insist that his twisted right foot was a different birth defect.

Boddy writes that his “Achilles tendons were so contracted he could only walk on the balls of his toes.” Yet she thinks that in boxing “the impact of his lameness was minimal” (p. 50). Byron’s biography in Britannica says that the poet suffered “several abnormalities . . .  including a withered calf, short leg, and an inward twisting of the ankle, causing him to walk on the side of his foot rather than on its sole.” This would surely have mattered in the ring more than Boddy allows. He had to wear a special boot or a “cloth shoe” on that foot. He was sensitive to the deformed member his whole life, for his limp impeded the swashbuckling image the poet cultivated

There is a fourth reason, and perhaps the most important, why Byron was drawn to boxing, and that is the mix of social worlds that occurs in the ring. Boxing appeals to the adventurous because it offers boxers the opportunity to meet men outside their usual communities. Byron imagined boxing as a cross-section of manly life. He owned a large screen, meant to block drafts or define space within a room; on one side it contains a collage of boxing prints with written accounts of matches.

(About 6’ high; images of boxers surrounded by newspaper clippings about fights and boxer biographies; reverse side is a history of English theater. See https://www.euromanticism.org/byron-decoupage-screen/ for descripion.)

Prominently portrayed on the screen is Tom Molineaux, a freed slave from Virginia, who in 1810 fought the English champion Tom Cribb; Crib defeated the American in 39 rounds (Boddy, p 45). Other American slaves were sent to London to learn to box. Byron made the eclectic social mix of the boxing world part of the décor of his home.

Detail of the screen: Boxers Jack Broughton and James Figg [his teacher], as if facing off. 3rd: Molineaux, former slave, American boxer; Gentleman John Jackson, right, Byron’s boxing instructor, his hat covering a boxer’s genitals.

Exercising a privilege of the well-to-do, Byron wanted to be seen as a gentleman who crossed class barriers. This can be seen as an act of bravery. In 1953, Byron’s social views were described by Jacques Barzun, Romantic cultural historian par excellence:

“Byron must be classed with those few influential men of rank who have taken the aristocratic ideal seriously. In obedience to it they have defied their own class and all other majorities, and braved scandal and obloquy for a cause that they also knew how to blazon forth. Such men give the words ‘independence’ and ‘example’ the fullest meaning they are capable of, and this is so rare that the world can never forget it.”  (quote from “Byron and the Byronic,” Atlantic, 1953; see also Barzun, Berlioz and the Romantic Century [1969])

Byron was socially mobile. One means for that mobility was boxing, which underscored his aristocratic standing while allowing him to mix with his social inferiors. Marchand writes that Byron was a “curious combination of aristocratic pride and liberal sympathies.” His makeup might have come from his mother, who described herself as a “Democrat” and who supported the people in the French revolution (Byron: A Portrait, p. 13).

On the other hand, Byron boasted of his aristocratic standing. When he was compared by some, including by his mother, to Rousseau. Byron objected. Rousseau was a prose writer, “of the people,” whereas he himself wrote poetry, “aligned with the Aristocracy.” Byron emphasized that he was athletic, whereas Rousseau was not. Rousseau could not fence or swim; Byron did both, and, he added, was “not a bad boxer when I could keep my temper, which was difficult” (Boddy, p. 55).

I had no idea that Byron was a boxer when I read his poetry as an undergraduate. I did not read Byron in graduate school and I can’t remember ever teaching a word he wrote. But I find that my enthusiasm for boxing resembles Byron’s. Any man can follow the poet’s lead.

Because boxing was a martial art, I knew it could be taught to somebody like me, with little athletic experience and no history of physical combat. Like Byron, I could take lessons.

Second, I found that boxing lessons, difficult thought they were, helped me feel better. I did not know about endorphins, but I could feel something lifting me up after a boxing lesson. This was highly motivating. I could also see that, as I stuck with lessons and workouts, I was improving. I started workout out more often.

Third, although I did not have physical deformity to work against, I did have an aversion to trying to do things I was sure I would not be good at. As a boy I played the piano, not softball. I would never have considered boxing. I did not want to look like I did not know what I was doing. Boxing lessons exposed that very thing. In addition, I was considerably older, smaller, stiffer, and lighter than almost any other man in the entire room.

Fourth, I learned to rub shoulders and trade punches with blue collar workers. No coach or other boxer asked what I did for a living; they did not care. I could also be comfortable being a white minority in my boxing classes and in the boxing gyms. I worked with students of many different backgrounds in my decades of teaching, but I was the teacher and they were the students: we did not form one group. But when boxing I was in a group, often the only white man there and invariably, and by far, the oldest. I had to work with them; they had to work with me.

I have known about the Byronic hero, at least as type, for a long time. I never considered that hero as a model for masculine development. It was only when I read John Clare’s description of Byron’s funeral procession that I began to think how boxing might have mattered to the masculine identity of these two men, who were contemporaries and poets and boxers. As it turns out, there is a lot to learn from Byron’s understanding of himself as a man. You don’t need the Byronic hero to be inspired by Byron’s magnificent achievements as a masculine man.