“Would Byron be cancelled today?” asks one of the academics at the round table. I smile at the emphasis he puts on the word; it is indeed a tentative expression to use in this setting. The likes of A.E. Stallings and Seamus Perry converse under their breath, others whip out paper and pens in sporadic movements. It has the air of a well-mannered cult, complete with tea and biscuit breaks.

The theme of the conference is ‘Byron Now’, making reference, as I understand it, to Byron’s legacy in the modern age. It has been two centuries to the day since he died of a fever on the turquoise shores of Missolonghi, two centuries since he composed some of the greatest comic poems in the English language. I am seated at one end of the lecture theatre, looking out not onto Greece but a damp Cambridge court. I wonder what he thought of his time here, what he would think of this.

The conference kicks off with a series of papers on travel, and the Byronic hero emerges as a figure with a blankness at his centre. Rather genially, Clare Bucknell diagnoses him as “adjectival” while Diego Saglia casts the poet as a cosmopolitan with a unique sense of the local. Sometime during the latter’s presentation, one of Byron’s letters appears on the screen. I jot down the line “I speak to you from another country, and as it were from another world.” Byron may have been writing from Italy, but looking around me at this eclectic, scarily intelligent group of people, I may as well be in “another world” too.

“It has the air of a well-mannered cult, complete with tea and biscuit breaks”

In the afternoon we relocate to the Wren. Greek ambassadors deliver a series of very solemn speeches, and everyone strains their necks to try and catch a glimpse of the wreaths they lay at the foot of Byron’s statue. One of the Ministers references the poet’s famous advocation for the reinstatement of the Parthenon marbles. It is a predictable, but fitting remark, with the statue holding what I like to imagine is the half-composed second canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. The crowd listens to these politicians’ retrospections with a mixture of curiosity and contempt. Some snicker over the use of the word “saint” (his being, of course, anything but that), others discuss how his vision of Greek nationalism was integral to nation-building.

I find myself mourning in a strange and oblique way, as if the man had only died recently. Then I realise that our image of Byron – so carefully constructed in the morning – is at odds with this solemn act of commemoration. That the finality of the occasion could find no place in a room full of people for whom the poet’s death (and life) is far from a closed affair.

In stark opposition to the wreath-laying, cartoons of scenes from Don Juan dot the room with unabashed vitality. This is the most remarkable effort so far at forging a Byron now, at finding the pictorial essence of his craft that lives on. As Dan Sperrin, the artist, explains in a complementary talk, the figures can be likened to certain NATO members, marking a topical reading of Juan that can be looked back at in decades to come, and perhaps even displayed at the next Byron conference in a hundred years’ time.

“I find myself mourning in a strange and oblique way, as if the man had only died recently”

There is, of course, something wishful in all this, but still, envious glances are passed around the room. Even the most faithful adherer to the written word can acknowledge the appeal of ink on paper, of guaranteed material permanency, and I think something of this longing carries through lunch and into the following papers, which talk of everything from Byron’s boots to the inexplicable, Tristram Shandy-like scrawl found in many of his manuscripts.

We gladly abandon ourselves to the music when the time for the recital comes, and a series of pieces by Schumann and Wolf illuminate the chapel with full, resplendent notes. I will never forget, however, when a woman asks me about the minute of silence. “What minute of silence?” I say, only half-listening. “At 18:15. The time he died in Greece,” she replies in great earnest. How she is so certain of this I do not know, but when the time comes around, I pay special attention to the words that are being read into the space. It is an excerpt from Juan about Haidee, the bit that goes:

Alas! They were so young, so beautiful,
So lonely, loving, helpless, and the hour
Was that in which the heart is always full,
And, having o’er itself no further power,
Prompts deeds eternity can not annul,
But pays off moments in an endless shower
Of hell-fire—all prepared for people giving
Pleasure or pain to one another living.

For the first time that day, I feel certain of something: Byron would have liked to know that the moment of his death is filled with words instead of silence; that his voice is still heard when so many others have been extinguished. There has been talk throughout the conference of quoting him in Tiananmen Square, in Palestine. My Byron is here, I decide as another piece begins. Between countries, between worlds.