Byron’s Poetic Experimentation Childe Harold, the Tales and the Quest for Comedy

In this study,the authorexamines the evolution of Byron's poetry from Childe Harold I and II through to the composition of Beppo. Beginning with a close reading of the sustained poetic experimentation that constitutes Childe Harold I and II, he charts the progress of that experimentation in the Tales where Byron's poetry gets entrenched in a tragic idiom.The authorthen describes Byron's prolonged struggle to break clear of the imaginative limitations imposed by that tragic idiom and to break into a sustainable comic mode: a struggle that drives Childe Harold III, The Prisoner of Chillon, and The Dream only to culminate in success in Childe Harold IV. It is here, as Rawes demonstrates, that the path forward into the comic mode of Beppo and Don Juan is discovered. Byron's Poetic Experimentation also offers a substantial reconsideration of Byron's shifting attitude towards Wordsworthian idealism and a detailed analysis of the structured eclecticism of Manfred.

Contents: Introduction; ’Mixed in one mighty scene with varied beauty glow’; ’The frame of things disjoint’; ’A narrow escape into faith’; ’Tears and tortures, and the touch of joy’; ’To increase our power increasing thine’; A ’more beloved existence’; Bibliography; Index.

Dr Alan Rawes is Senior Lecturer in Romanticism at The University of Manchester.