In 1812, when he began to publish his long poem Childe Harold, Byron, as he himself said, awoke to find that he was famous. In death he's more notorious than famous, as his poetry, in and of itself, divorced from its autobiographical content, has not held its place in the canon the way his friend Shelley's has, for example. Byron was one of those writers whose imagination was largely self-referential and whose life was of greater intrinsic interest than his work. Such people are fated to be discussed biographically more than critically, and this is precisely the approach Grosskurth takes here, but with one important twist.

What Grosskurth has written is in fact a psycho-biography, although it is not labelled as such (and although she herself is not a practising psychologist). This will surprise no-one who has read her previous biographies, such as those of the Victorian aesthete John Addington Symonds, the pioneer sexologist Havelock Ellis, or the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein. Nor does it seem in the least inappropriate or even avoidable. The truth is: some personalities are complex enough to beg for psycho-biography (Hitler, Nixon) while others (Wayne or Shuster-I'm sorry, I forget which one is dead) probably fall short in this respect. A figure like Byron fills out a psycho-biographer's couch quite nicely, thank you.

First there was the problem of his club foot, which actually was more than just a club foot but an atrophied leg to go with it. Then there was his title, which he inherited while still a young boy, thus becoming burdened with the ruinous demands of the family estate, Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire, and the accumulated debts of his scapegrace forebears. What a colourful band they are. George Gordon, subject of the biography, was the 6th Baron Byron. The 5th baron, his uncle, had been nicknamed "the Wicked Lord", while the poet's grandfather and father were called "Foulweather Jack" and "Mad Jack" respectively and not without reason. When, as a young man, Byron felt attracted to a certain member of the opposite sex, he was able to remark, by way of small talk, that his great-uncle had killed her great-uncle in a duel. (How rare today for young people to connect on that level.)

Byron became an atheist. "Talk of Galileeism?" he wrote. "Show me the effects-are you [made] better, wiser, kinder by [its] precepts?" He became a rebel, whose "politics are to me like a young mistress to an old man[:] the worse they grow the fonder I become of them." He became vain about his good looks and celebrity. At one point, Grosskurth writes: "Byron and the recently introduced new German dance, the waltz, had become the rage at precisely the same time. Byron's subsequent behaviour indicated that he resented the waltz, not only because he could not participate in it, but because it detracted from the attention that might have been concentrated exclusively on him."

Most of all he became addicted to his own thirst for experience. Our devoir, he wrote, is to "feel that we exist-even through the pain-it is this `craving void' which drives us to Gaming-to Battle-to Travel-to intemperate but keenly felt pursuits of every description whose principal attraction is the agitation inseparable from their accomplishment.." He included sex, particularly illicit or dodgy sex, in this list of necessary endeavours. Naturally it is on this area that Grosskurth, in her role as a psychological enquirer, focuses (but not unduly, as Puritan critics will no doubt assert).

Describing the young Byron (or rather the young young Byron, for he was only thirty-six when he died), Grosskurth, in a typical moment, writes as follows: "During these carpe diem early months in Athens [in 1810] he reverted to the manic hedonism of an adolescent off the leash. His sexual activities were by no means confined only to boys. Indeed, it was one of those recurrent periods of rampant promiscuity that seized him from time to time throughout his life."

Grosskurth's use of the modern word "manic" is notable here; she employs it more than once as the only possible aid to helping us understand her subject. For example: "Byron's behaviour in the weeks following [his mother's] death displayed a pattern of manic denial. His mother had been in effect his only parent. The most superficial explanation for his passion for younger boys would be that they were a creation of the ideal father-son relationship; and is it not equally possible that the tantrums and passionate reconciliations were a re-enactment of the relationship with his mother?"

But the quotations I've selected above put false emphasis on Byron's ambidextrousness. His major entanglements were heterosexual. Putting aside his wife (as he did), the important relationships were two. One was with his half-sister (they had a child). Curiously, Mad Jack Byron had also had an incestuous affair in his day. The poet's other great passion was with the famous Lady Caroline Lamb, who coined the phrase "mad, bad, and dangerous to know" to describe him-and once sent him a lock (though that's surely not the right word) of her pubic hair. Byron's publisher John Murray (whose firm still brings out Byron's works in England) was himself an admirer of Lady Caroline. In Grosskurth's quaint yet unvarnished words, Murray "seems to have been flattered and intrigued by this grand yet fragile vixen."

This is hardly the language of the usual censorious literary biographer of present times. But one of the compelling attractions of Byron: The Flawed Angel is that Grosskurth writes in proper British English, without much of a nod to American journalese. This may well prove to be what prevents the book from being banned by a library board somewhere in Ontario: the sentences won't be understood there. Indeed, Grosskurth is particularly subtle and clever in matters of diction and voice. In her book, a phrase like "gamblers and demi-reps" can coexist freely with selections from the psychiatric lexicon. And while she knows that Byron's poetry must be the main tool for accessing his imagination ("Poetry had always provided a release for his pent-up emotions"), she has the wisdom to quote mostly from the prose of his letters and journals ("As usual, I have been obliged to empty [my mind] in rhyme."). I, for one, learned much and derived some pleasure from this thoroughly contemporary (and therefore brave) new gloss on Byron.

Douglas Fetherling's most recent book is Way Down Deep in the Belly of the Beast (Lester). He has nearly finished his biography of George Woodcock, which will be published by Douglas & McIntyre. This month, St. Mary's University in Halifax is honouring him with a D.Litt.