I recently read that there was a surge in Lord Byron’s popularity in the USA in the 1920s and 1930s. I find that so hard to believe. It must have simply vanished from American consciousness without a trace after the war (Stefan Zweig’s novels are a similar case).

How many American schoolchildren in the last several decades read any Byron? Even at the university level, I never read him directly, I only heard some things about him that were mainly negative, like his sexism, or his role in insisting that a newly independent Greece revive the Ancient Greek culture that Western Europeans expected from it, when it fact Greece had been a deeply Orthodox Christian society for 1500 years and all those pagan gods and Athenian or Spartan values had long been forgotten.