Lord Byron: Childe Harold's Pilgrimage

Byron is situated between Milton, whose suffering Satan retained more than a hint of nobility even though God's ways were supposedly justified, and Nietzsche's ubermench who in suffering the laughter of rejection and the pain of alienated righteousness, destroys the old gods and brings in the new. Byron's duality is couched within a will to do and the weakness to do not - always with the hanging question, does either path really matter? This conflict keeps Byron’s humanity locked, like Pascal's paradoxical pronouncement, in "a mid-point between nothing and everything." Pope could assert in the 18th century that "Man was created half to rise and half to fall," while Byron had to struggle with if humanity was created at all, and by whom, and for what purpose? The most distilled revelation of this conflicted search for meaning within, and behind, the human condition comes in Byron's confessional narrative Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812-1819). In this aspiring epic, Byron presents the Visionary's "compulsive search for an ideal and a perfection that do[es] not exist in the world of reality…the unquenchable thirst for ideality and the dissatisfaction with reality."