Byron: Life and Legend by Fiona MacCarthy. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 674 Pages. $35.00

The Kindness of Sisters: Annabella Milbanke and the Destruction of the Byrons by David Crane. Alfred A. Knopf. 290 pages. $26.95

At the age of 20, the soon-to-be famous George Gordon, Lord Byron, wearily wrote to a friend that a doctor had advised him to cut back on sex. "In fact," he wrote, "my blue-eyed Caroline, who is only sixteen, has been lately so charming, that though we are both in perfect health, we are at present commanded to repose, being nearly worn out."

That very evening, he records in another letter, "we supped with seven whores, a Bawd and a Ballet-master in Madame Catalan's apartment." He considered "purchasing" a few of the ballet students, who "would fill a glorious harem." From the same letter: "I am buried in an abyss of Sensuality, I have renounced hazard however, but I am given to Harlots, and live in a state of Concubinage." A few weeks later: "I have tried every kind of pleasure, and it is `Vanity.'" A bout of illness, probably venereal disease, holds him up, but not for long. "I am still in or rather near town residing with a nymph," he tells another correspondent, "who is now on the sofa vis-a-vis, while I am scribbling...I have three females (attendants included) in my custody." Two weeks later, he would brag of seducing both "the 'chere amie' of a French painter in Pall Mall, a lively Gaul — and occasionally an Opera Girl from the same Meridian." He would also tell of going out for a night on the town, getting in a fight, then recovering, along with ten of his pals, at a "House of Fornication."

Women, women, women — the great English Romantic poet's short life was full of them, but how much of all that was just PR? A few of the above letters were written to a minister, after all — who could have resisted a little embroidering for the sake of shock? Long before anyone coined the phrase "cult of personality," Byron had it down cold. He knew the art of shaping his own myth. James Dickey, who knew how that game was played, was rather admiring when he said Byron was the kind of "enormous phony ... who makes the public take him on his own terms, the terms of his persona." Byron warned against reading too much of him into his poems, but the poems begged you to do otherwise, even when they weren't frankly autobiographical. Byron also claimed to draw from personal experience; where love and life were concerned, there was no substitute for the real thing. That was the source of his beef with John Keats, whose poetry he dismissed as "a sort of mental masturbation — he is always f--gg--g his Imagination." For Byron, "The great object of life is Sensation — to feel that we exist — even though in 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."