Many British writers have had an influence beyond the English-speaking world. Shakespeare and Dickens are particularly noteworthy in this regard. But Byron’s impact on nineteenth-century Europe was historical, and not just literary. ‘Before he came,’ the Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini wrote,

Mazzini was writing in 1839. In the twentieth century, Byron’s posthumous pilgrimage through intellectual Europe came to an end, and two key elements in his myth – the gloomy hero and the freedom fighter – withered away with the passage of time and the march of events. Philosophical existentialism and modern political ideology made both those figures look outdated, and what chiefly remained of Byron’s influence, apart from his status as a literary celebrity, was the appeal of his later, comic verse. His improvisational, conversational, but also novelistic style continued to inspire poets: the Englishman W. H. Auden in his ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ (1937), the American Kenneth Koch in The Duplications (1977), and the Indian Vikram Seth in The Golden Gate (1986).